The sun is wrapped up in a thick puffy quilt to keep warm.
Admin2 is reading The Rising Tide by Patrick Easter; an eightteenth-century river policeman investigates a murder and meets Prime Minister Pitt.
We scored 9 on the GSQ. None of our guesses worked out so the only points we got were for things we actually knew.
Category: Weather
Rainy Days and Mondays
27.6 mm. We were going to get up for the lunar eclipse at 3am, but under the circumstances didn’t bother.
Admin1 is rereading Real Tigers by Mick Herron. Admin2 is reading A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel.
In the Empty City
City Square, the would-be bustling hub of Leeds, at prime shopping time and the place is deserted apart from some trees and the Black Prince.
Admin1 is rereading Dead Lions by Mick Herron. Admin2 is reading The Dark by Emma Haughton, a juvenile mystery/romance, wasted on the locked room/powder keg setting of an Antarctic research station in winter.
Today was the warmest day this year: 23.2 °C.
The next day was cloudy and cool. We ate pork, veg and rice with the newlyweds and scored 11 on the GSQ after a lot of guesswork and bet-hedging.
Cumulus, Contrails and Communication Cables
On the sunniest day of the year so far (11.230kWh) Admin1 is reading The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves. Admin2 is reading The Stone Chamber by Kate Ellis; a Devonshire crime tease.
Good Friday
A nice warm day and a red sky @ night.
Happy Easter, Passover, Ramadan and Vaisakhi!
Admin1 is reading Dead Man’s Lane by Kate Ellis. Admin2 is reading The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears which was ho hum.
Hooray Hooray It’s a Halo Halo Day!
A sundog in the morning…
…and a halo in the afternoon.
Followed by buckets of rain.
Admin1 is rereading Cut Short by Leigh Russell. Admin2 is reading The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard, a gripping novel in which the perpetrator of a string of unsolved murders is reading a true-crime book written by a survivor of his depredations.
Mushroom Cloud
Ooh er! Saw this shape in the sky and couldn’t resist.
Admin1 is reading Survivor’s Guilt by Michael Wood, in which enough tears are shed to float the Titanic. An awful book, a histrionic soap opera with a terrible plot.
Admin2 is reading You Don’t Know Me by Imran Mahmood, a convincing piece of cultural appropriation from a fifty-something Pakistani barrister writing in the first-person voice of a London teenager of Nigerian descent.
Despite the clouds and rain and sudden burst of hail it was the sunniest day of the years so far: 8.449kWh
April Foul
Snow again, cold again. It will probably improve.
March was averagely warm, averagely wet and slightly above averagely sunny.
Admin1 is reading 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard. Admin2 is reading The Doll by Yrsa Sigurdasdotter.
Goodbye Sun
End of a run of warm sunny days, to be followed, if the forecasts are to be believed, by clouds, frost, sleet, snow and stormy winds.
Admin1 is reading The Doll by Yrsa Sigurdasdotter. Admin2 is reading Unhinged by Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger.
After the Flood
A day without a storm when there was enough rain for a couple of rainbows and the solar panels served up >2kWh for the first time this year.
And it’s Twosday: 22/2/22 and it’s 22.22 too.
Admin2 is reading The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut; a gloomy book about a failing hospital in the South African bundu; no wonder it was on the Booker shortlist.
Storm Franklin
Oh no, not another one!
It was a dark and stormy night and the morning saw broken branches everywhere and two trees up the road felled. Our sheltered weather station recorded a gust of 34 mph (there might have been worse ones — it is only working intermittently) and we are well on track for our rainiest month ever.
The wind died away and Orion shone down on us. Our family meal was a magnificent cheese pithivier and we scored a sad 8.5 on the GSQ.
Admin2 is reading Snap by Belinda Bauer, a light read about a thieving orphan searching for his mother’s murderer.
Storm Eunice
Blow blow followed by snow snow.
Storm Eunice was the worst this century in this country but the worst we saw were a few flattened fences and all that happened to us was that the cover blew off one of our ventilators.
Admin1 is rereading ‘salem’s Lot by Stephen King.
Storm Dudley
Today was a day to stay at home and watch the raging winds from the windows. Sadly Admin1 had to go to work in the blustering gales.
Rainy Days and Sundays
Admin1 is reading Desperation by Stephen King. Admin2 is reading The Anomaly by Herve le Tellier which was wonderful and full of wonders.
We had a delicious family dinner of roast lamb and a weird dark trifle made from blood oranges, black grapes and chocolate cake and scored 10 and lots of near misses on the GSQ.
Gongxi Fa Cai
An overblown orange sunset for the Year of the Tiger. Storms Malik and Corrie have been blowing all over us but the leafless trees scarcely move.
Admin1 is rereading End of Watch by Stephen King. Admin2 is reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. Even back in the day when people were playing Zork, Rupert Murdoch was destroying left-wing governments.
Sun of Rothko
When morning comes around.
Admin1 is reading Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. Admin2 is reading Born in a Burial Gown by MW Craven.
Hockney and Mockney
Admin2 has been appreciating the iPad drawings in David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 (thx Admin1). Like Admin2, he also saw the same things over and over, and he also observed the sun projected by a pinhole camera of leaves. Today, for the first time this year, the solar panels generated over a kilowatt hour.
Admin1 is reading Body Breaker by MW Craven.
Morning Broken
Here’s another sunrise, this time with a bit of spin.
Admin1 enjoyed Dead Ground so much that he bought a box set of MW Craven books. Now Admin1, working forwards, is reading The Puppet Show and admin2, working backwards, is reading The Curator.
Clouds of the Day: Radiatus
This is a photo disguised as a chalk drawing. I’m grateful to David Hockney for pointing out that the Old Masters were also working from photos (using mirrors, lenses, camerae obscurae and the like; just not film or CCDs).
Admin1 is reading White Corridor by Christopher Fowler. Admin2 is reading Dead Ground by MW Craven.
Ghost Town
Distant skyscrapers dematerialising in the fog. Despite the mist and fog all day, the solar panels produced more energy than yesterday with its constant dazzling sunshine.
Admin1 is reading Dead Ground by MW Craven. Admin2 was reading The Incendium Plot by AD Swanston but gave up halfway through because it was boring and unpleasant. Radcliff is an Elizabethan lawyer with a bent finger but he ain’t no Shardlake, bro.
We scored 9.5 on the GSQ, which was not too bad considering.
More Morning Light
Apparently dawns are more impressive than sunsets because we view them with rested, dark-adapted eyes in clear air. And because we see the sunsets through telephone wires and rooftops. The other side of the sky, though, featured a rainbow without any rain.
Admin1 is rereading London Bridge Is Falling Down by Christopher Fowler. Admin2 is reading The Heron’s Cry by Ann Cleeves.
Here It Comes Again
Soon the sun will get up before we do.
Admin1 is rereading Oranges and Lemons by Christopher Fowler.
We watched Don’t Look Up, which was totally believable.
Moon and Jupiter
Crescent moon, with a faintly visible Jupiter above it, preceding the coldest night of the winter so far at -3.3°C.
Admin1 is rereading Bryant and May on the Loose by Christopher Fowler. Admin2 is reading Bad Day at the Vulture Club by Vaseem Khan.
Good Morning
Same old view of the sun coming up through the back window. The sky was full of flocks of birds which flew away before they could be photographed.
We had roast lamb followed by two kinds of carrot cake and a banana cake for our New Year family meal and scored 11 on the GSQ. Now is the time to tot up our average score for the past year, which was … badum tish … 11.73921568: our best ever, cf last year and all the years before.
Admin1 is reading The Heron’s Cry by Ann Cleeves (thx Admin2). Admin2 is reading The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star by Vaseem Khan. Gotta get those books back to the library soon.
Crepuscular Rays
“For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air”
From The Cloud by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as quoted in Spring by Ali Smith, which Admin2 is relishing today.