Tag Archives: sudden thaw

Sunday 25th January 2015 – I SHOULD HAVE …

… gone round to Liz and Terry’s this afternoon to rehearse our radio programmes. But
1) our recording session on Monday morning is cancelled
2) I have to go round there on Monday afternoon anyway
3) seeing as how the roads are rather treacherous just now …
I made the decision that I would stay here instead and not venture out. After all, in these kinds of conditions it’s not a good idea to venture out unless it’s really essential.

I was awake quite early this morning – so much so that it was still dark. There was absolutely no chance of my leaving my stinking pit at that time of the morning so I turned over and went back to sleep. It was a much-more respectable 11:10 when I finally made it to the breakfast table.

I finished off the radio text that I’ve been writing and it’s ended up as a a quite respectable 24kb of text. That’s about 4300 words and should keep us busy for a couple of months at least. And apart from that, I’ve not done very much at all.

Mind you, we did have a sudden thaw later this afternoon and for a brief moment the temperature soared for to a massive 2.9°C. That gave me an opportuity to refill the water containers up here as we seem to be running quite low over the last few days. It might stay a little warmer too for the next few days although they say that winter will come back with a vengeance later in the week.

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Tuesday 12th January 2010 – Well, the weather man got it right today.

It was bound to happen sooner or later – the law of averages is bound to match a wild guess with an actuality sooner or later.

In fact I couldn’t believe it – at first I thought that he had mixed up today with yesterday as the morning was magnificent – a proper Alpine winter day and the solar controllers were ticking over the charge like nobody’s business. I carried on insulating the floor this morning. And it seems to be working too. The early morning average difference between in here and in the lean-to is usually about 7 degrees. Today it was almost 10 degrees. That can’t be coincidence.

I didn’t get much of a chance to do much work though – I had a phone call that involved me doing quite a few other things instead. And seeing as it was a nice morning I had the computer on and started to catch up with a whole pile of messages that have been outstanding. I must have sent out about 30 e-mails to people and they are all going to get a surprise when they try to reply to me, as my web site is down again.

It appears that my web host has closed its doors rather … errr …. suddenly. Not that I’m surprised about this as a phrase involving booze-ups and breweries springs to mind whenever I think of this organisation. What with crashed servers that they couldn’t fix, lost data in e-mail accounts, disappearing files due to fits of pique, a whole host of other things as well that regular readers of these pages will be well aware, I’m surprised that they managed to stagger on to this extent before finally rolling over. There’s a lot more to running a professional and ethical organisation involving hi-tec equipment than you will ever learn by studying an Open University course. But then again most normal people would realise that.

And there you are, trying to be loyal and supportive of people that you like and people who are making an effort to carve out a living for themselves against all the odds and all the rubbish that life has heaped upon them, and it all falls to pieces anyway. “There’s no sentiment in business” I keep on being told, and it’s high time I learnt the lesson. Trying to be nice to people and giving them a helping hand just causes me more problems than it’s worth. I should have been much more ruthless and kicked this shambles into touch the first time they let me down.

I’ve been approached by a “successor” who wants to have my business and we are trying to salvage what we can from the wreckage of dazzling incompetence.
“I’ll match the terms and conditions that my predecessors offered” he announced. So I told him what the terms and conditions were – and his jaw hit the floor.
“They told me you paid …(almost twice as much)” he stuttered
“Well I have the invoice, the bank statement and the cancelled cheque here if you would like to see them“
Someone is speaking with forked tongue, and I know that it isn’t me. And as for the motives – well, just lets say that “it’s fun to speculate”.

Meanwhile, if you want to mail me and the e-mail bounces, wait for a couple of days and resend it.

So after all of these shenanigans, the weather dramatically warmed up and we had a torrential downpour. And about 10 tonnes of snow slid of the roof just three or four feet above my head, and crashed to the ground with the roar of an express train. It put the wind up me for a minute. Rather like the man who gave his pitbull terrier a bicycle pump. “That’ll put the wind up the postman!”.

I was talking to Alexi on a chat program earlier. We were discussing cars and driving tests and she was telling me about hers – which she took in Zambia, where she was living at the time. She had to reverse between two bollards and then drive the examiner to the post office – and that was that. I told her about the Libyan driving test where you have to reverse between two palm trees -which are about 5 miles apart.

And I did hear about a driving test in the Spanish Sahara or the Central African Republic or somewhere like that. The pupil was involved in quite a serious collision in which the examiner was killed. As they pulled him from the wreckage the pupil shouted “did I pass? Did I pass?”
“Wait a minute” shouted one of the policemen at the scene. “We haven’t found the examiner’s clipboard yet!”

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Monday 21st December 2009 – Temperature inversion is a wonderful thing

When I got back from the Anglo-French meeting tonight, the warmest place was … errr … outside. 7.5 degrees, a whopping 2 degrees warmer than in the verandah, a massive 7 degrees warmer than in the kitchen, and 3 degrees warmer than in my attic.

Yes, we’ve had a sudden thaw. My attention was drawn to it at about 13:00 when I heard a noise that sounded like a railway train passing overhead. I turned round and saw a huge sheet of snow slide off the roof. So I went outside, and it was WARM – the first time it’s been warm for over a week. I was humming and hawing about going out tonight but the thaw decided it – off to the shops before they close and stock up on things that I might need if I get snowed in again.But as things stand I am more likely to sink into the swamp that has been created outside.

And today is the first day in about 100 years that we haven’t had any precipitation. I suppose that that is something to celebrate. But that is truly astonishing for with the temperature inversion we have heavy grey clouds and so sod all solar energy.

Mind you, just now there isn’t a cloud in the sky and it’s totally clear. But of course that’s because it’s night-time. It won’t be like this in the daylight, that’s for certain. I’m convinced that the sun is never going to shine again.

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