marjorie73 | Entries tagged with cold

My friend Wendy has been visiting England, and we'd arranged to meet up and for her to vist me for the first 2 days of her trip, so last Sunday I met her at Heathrow, and we drove back to Wiltshire via Stonehenge and Avebury.

It was very, very cold - there was snow on the ground when I got up, and it kept trying to snow on us all day.

We had a bracing walk around some of the stones at Avebury, then visited the Manor,which has recently been done up by the National Trust, by reproducing (rather than preserving) furniture and fittings, and have arranged different rooms as they may have been at different periods, ranging from a Tudor Hall and Bedroom, to a 1939 living room (complete with zebra-skin chair, and cocktail-shakers.)

Tudor Bedroom, Avebury Manor

Because almost everything is reproduction rather than original (things like the fireplaces, the ceilings and plasterwork etc are original), visitors are encouraged to touch and try - I didn't lie on the Tudor style four-poster because it has a feather mattress, and I am allergic to feathers, but I could have done, had I wished!

They have a tea-shop in the library, too, where Wendy was able to sample her first English cream tea :-) And we were both able to warm up enough to escape hypothermia. There were some very *bracing* breezes going on out among the stones..

And then, after visiting the Avebury museum (small; contains a lot of flint axes) back to my house, to defrost ourselves a little more.

Current Mood: cold

It's turned very cold again. It snowed a little on Sunday night, and again today (although none of it settled) and it all proved too much for my car battery, which gave up the ghost overnight, and could summon up only a tiny, pathetic cough this morning, rather that, y'know, actually starting the car.

Fortunately, I do have breakdown cover (including Home Start) and it must be admitted that if you are going to have a non-working car, the best place to have it must be at home. At least I was able to wait inside, in the warm, and to get on with some work while I waited.

I would not have been impressed with a wait of almost 3 hours had I been sitting miserably at the side of the road!

On the plus side, I have a new car battery, so I shouldn't have the trouble again.

But I am so very ready for it to start being properly Spring-like, now.

Current Mood: cold

It feels as though it's been a long week - I've been busy at work, and this past week has involved a lot of time out of the office, driving to court and meetings, which is tiring.

Friday night was our office Christmas Party - I wasn't feeling terribly festive but I think it went reasonably well. The Christmas trees are up in our receptions, at work, and the lights are up in the town centres, and I am beginning to look forward to seeing my family, and have done most of my shopping. Having lots of cards to send to friends in America spurred me on to organise myself, in order to catch the last posting date, so my inland cards went pretty promptly, too (am now sitting back, to wait for the first card to show up from someone I've forgotten to send one to, or for whom I don't have an address.....

Next task is to pack up the gifts for people I won't be seeing, in order to post them. This is bound to involve a lot of queueing, I fear..

Today, my (2nd) cousin came over for lunch, and to drop of gifts for my family and my (1st) cousins, who I shall be seeing and she
won't. it was a nice lunch, though I do say so myself. I made Beouf Bourgignon, served with jacket potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower. And as a bonus, I find there are enough lefftovers for me to have it again, another day, which I was not expecting!

I have been having some issues with my central heating, which I only realised when it got very cold earlier this week - I found that one (the biggest - it would be) of my 3 radiators wasn't getting hot. I thought that |step one would be to bleed it, and this caused me to realise that, to my shame, I've never done this and had no idea how it was done. Fortunately, Twitter knows everything, so I got answers within minutes, and then had to go out and buy a radiator key ( and picked up a spare heater at the same time, to tide me over) Unfortunately, bleeding it does not seem to have worked as far as acheiving actual warmth is concerned (although it worked quite well as far as getting dirty water around the living room was concerned!)

I belive that the next step is flushing it and add inhibitor, but I think I shall need a plumber for that step. *sigh* Still, at least I have plug-in heater I just bought, to prevent me getting hypothermia in the mean time. (and over Christmas I shall be staying with my parents, and they have lots and lots of loverly central heating, even upstairs!)

I think next weekend I shall perhaps get further into the festive spirit by making some mince pies.

(originally posted at www.margomusing.blogspot.com)

I have a nasty, flu-ey cold. My sinuses hurt. My chest hurts. My throat hurts. My head hurts. My nose both hurts and bleeds.

I was going to post something very witty and entertaining, but my brain is full of cotton wool, and there is no inspiration in me.

Sorry.

Maybe later.

Current Mood: sick

(originally posted at http://margomusing.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-which-further-blizzards-fail-to.html )

At the risk of tempting fate, and calling down further snow upon us, it seems that the additional snow forecast for this afternoon has held off - it was quite overcast so didn't appear to be anything like as cold as it was yesterday or on Friday.

Indeed, by mid afternoon it looked as though the street outside was clearer than it has been since it first snowed, on We

dnesday, with patches where the ashphalt is visible again, and a lot of people seem to have gone out so there were fewer parked cars. I decided to see whether I could safely drive out to the main(er) road, on the bass that if I could, I could park overnight and then, even if it freezes again overnight I would be close enough to the treated roads to get out and be able to get to work.

My plan worked, and as the road was completely clear when I got to the end of the street, I decided to go a little further, and drove over to Bradford-on-Avon, where I went for a short wander along by the canal.

The canal (The Kennet & Avon) was frozen, although there were places, by the lock, under bridges, and where a small stream drains into it where it was not frozen - there were also places where the ice had been broken and refrozen

- it looked at thought the ice was between 1" and 2" thick, and from the foot-prints in the slush on top of the ice it was clear that it was strong enough to bear the weight of the swans and other waterbirds., although various holes seems to show that it was not strong enough to bear the weight of various lumps of stone being heaved into it!

A little further down the canal one comes to the Tithe Barn, which was built in the early 1300s and used to belong to Shaftesbury

Abbey, until Henry VIII pur a stop to all that, of course! It's a beautiful (and enormous) building, and it is one of those places where it tends suddenly to hit me how rich in history we are here: The barn dates from the 14th C, with the church having owned the farm & land since 1001, and the barn continued to be used, certainly into the 1950s...

I enjoyed my walk, and, in accordance with the original plan, subsequently left my car down the street, in the hope that I may be able to drive tomorrow morning..