Ou sont les neiges d’antan? Well they have gone for at least a while and for the first time in ten days we have action on the solar panels and people are moving about outside.
A1 is rereading Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre. A2 is rereading The Mind’s Eye by Hakan Nesser.
Category: Weather
Frost
Happy birthday Faye.
Icy cylinders on the dustbin lid. One day the snow will go.
A2 is reading Gliff by Ali Smith.
Still Snowy
It is still freezing cold, ice everywhere, lethally slippery pavements. A1 had to go to work in the horrible conditions and said it was like walking over crisps. A2 only went as far as the dustbin, wearing crampons and holding onto the wall, and noticed that the snowperson population had increased.
A1 is reading I will Find the Key* by Alex Ahndoril. A2 is reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (thx A1).
Snowy Sunday
We’ve had 13cm of snow today and next-door’s kids have made a very traditional snowperson on the traffic island.
The family slogged here through the wintry weather for a dinner of meat loaf with potatoes, sprouts and pico pizzas for the mini people, followed by a reprise of last year’s Christmas pudding ice cream bombe.
We missed the Quadrantids and yesterday evening’s occultation of Saturn by the Moon due to the miserable weather. And oh dear, we scored 7 on the first GSQ of the year. The snow is turning to rain and we’ve registered over 50mm so far this month. Things can only get wetter.
First Light
A2, woken by Mars glaring at her through the window, got up to look for Mercury. Did not see it (it was probably behind a tree) but was enchanted by the colours of the sky.
A2 is reading The Enigma Girl by Henry Porter.
Spot the Sun
This morning was very foggy so A1 was able to photograph the sun’s face though the murk. It had a few small spots but was looking pretty good for its encounter with the Parker Solar Probe.
On the left is an annotated picture from SpaceWeather for comparison.
Return of the Sun
After the solstice, a brighter dawn, with Mercury somewhere behind the clouds.
A1 is rereading Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen, his first Department Q novel from 2007. This was prompted by reading his recent novel Locked In, which finally resolves the mysteries posed in Mercy and ends with the start of that book.
A2 is rereading The Strangler’s Honeymoon by Hakan Nesser.
Windy Solstice
Today was unconscionably blustery; bins blowing everywhere. A2 had to keep stopping and planting herself foursquare (legs, stick and shopping trolley) to avoid being blown off course. But she emerged from a ginnel like a wind tunnel to the sight of this evanescent rainbow. Then the sun went away and the wind blew on.
A2, inspired by a list of Christmas crime novels in the newspaper, is rereading Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, which starts with Christmas and ends with a crime but is really a story of a man remorselessly exploited by a woman.
Bottoms Up
Storm Darragh is raging outside but our rain gauge is blocked and serving as a useful drinking source for the birds.
The family braved the storm for our family dinner of stroggers and sticky toffee pudding and we scored 11.5 on the GSQ. Yay us!
A2 is rereading The Readymade Thief* by Augustus Rose.
Hallo Halo
A halo and contrails, while we’re waiting for Storm Darragh.
A2 is reading The Last Devil to Die* by Richard Osman. We are watching Black Doves.
Good Morning, Good Morning
Our webcam caught a colourful sunrise this morning:
A1 is reading Leave No Trace* by Jo Callaghan. A2 is rereading The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas.
The Rainbow Wraps Up the Rain
A2 went out in the morning sunshine feeling happy and healthy and was caught in an unpredicted biting squally rainstorm. By the time she got home she had been infected with A1’s miserable sniffly headachy cold and is feeling full of snot and self-pity. Meanwhile she is rereading Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas.
Storm Bert
We woke to a blanket of snow and subzero temperatures; now at 11pm it’s 14.1°C and steadily rising. In between we’ve had 25.8 mm of rain and, thanks to the snow and subsequent gloom, a grand total of zero watt hours on the solar panels. Weather: exciting innit?
A2 is rereading This Poison Will Remain by the inestimable Fred Vargas.
Snow Fox Trot
Earliest snow on our records and a fox comes exploring in a winter wonderland with the colours of Hokusai’s Wave.
A2 is reading The Labyrinth House Murders* by Yukito Ayatsuji. Just like in Ink Ribbon Red* (qv) a birthday party host orders his guests to write a murder story involving themselves (it’s a 60th birthday, the guests are professional crime writers and there is a big prize at stake — but still). Where do they get their crazy ideas?
Hallowali
It’s a festival of lights in one culture (but no fireworks this year) and an excess of pumpkins, ghosts, skeletons, witches and bats in another. Here’s next-door’s creepy display.
October was the second coldest October on record and has less rain and sun than average.
A2 is rereading Bryant & May: Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler and A1 is rereading Fowler’s Bryant & May: The Victoria Vanishes in an annoying American edition. If there’s one thing I can never imagine Arthur Bryant saying, it’s “cell phone” — but oddly, this is the only thing that’s been Americanised: there are still sweets, not candy, pavements rather than sidewalks, colours not colors and so on. Which made the ubiquitous changing of “mobile” or “phone” even more noticeable. And irritating. These books are quintessentially English — more specifically, Londonish (if there’s such a word), and Americanising them is just wrong. I don’t want US-written books to be Anglicised, so why do the opposite? US readers aren’t idiots.
A Foggy Day
The fog hung around all day; no chance of the comet, but here is the marvel of a cobweb coated with jewels.
A1 is rereading Strange Tides by Christopher Fowler. A2 is rereading The Man who had No Idea by Thomas M Disch, who has more ideas than you can shake a stick at.
Cloud of the Day: Cirrus Vertebratus
(Actually a cloud of yesterday; today’s clouds were drizzly nimbostratus and still no comet.) This cloud has a backbone!
A1 is rereading Bryant and May on the Loose by Christopher Fowler.
Sundog
An evening parhelion above the chimney pots and TV aerials.
A1 is reading Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming. A2 is rereading The Adjacent by Christopher Priest.
Autumn Leaf
And so the foliage withers and falls, the nights draw in, the temperature drops, the sweaters go on, the bills go up… Last month was our coldest, wettest and cloudiest September of all time and yesterday only had 0.3mm less rain than the whole of August.
A1 is rereading The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley. A2 is reading The Future by Naomi Alderman; the tech oligarchs get their comeuppance as is only right and proper.
Water Pipes
A very loud bagpiper droning away in the pouring rain.
A1 is rereading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley.
Equinoctial Sunshine
Winter is coming but the sun is shining, with a corona.
A1 is reading Trio by William Boyd. A2 is reading The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon, which features a happily married detective with well-behaved teenage children and a love of reading Sophocles in his spare time. Nobody dies either. Weird or what?
Today Is…
…Cloud Appreciation Day. So here’s a montage timelapse of today’s cloudscapes, about 6 hours in less than 2 minutes: cumulus, altocumulus and cirrocumulus all blowing in different directions.
A2 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris; the PM dallies with a young woman on the brink of World War One. True story; nothing changes.
Pop-up Rainbow
Here come the clouds with a surprise transitory rainbow, caught on our weathercam.
A1 is reading Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson. A2 is reading Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts; a crazy space opera that sucks you in like a black hole, and one of his philosophical novels — a Deleuzian delusion.
Rain Spots
Just a few of the millions of raindrops that have fallen on us today. We have had more rain this week than in the whole of August.
A1 is reading The Conspirators by GW Shaw. A2 is reading the delicious Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (thx A1 xxx).
Sun Spots
A1 photographed the sun through the clouds today and revealed several sunspots. Mouse over the image for a comparison photo taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite at around the same time.
A2 is reading Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (thx A1).