marjorie73 | Entries tagged with ice

Winter has arrived properly, now - we have had several nights with temps of -5 or -6 (Celsius, but this is Southern England, it counts as really cold) and thick frosts.
This morning I walked into town to go to the library - it's National Libraries Day, although the Library didn't appear to have any special events on.

The decorative pond in the park had icy teeth around its perimeter, and an isolated few icicles above where the fountain plays.

The pond was full of ice-bubbles.

I hadn't planned it, but as I went past the butchers it occurred to me that in this kind of weather, one should be eating hearty, warming stews, so I popped in for some steak, which is now in the slow but glorious process of being transformed into Boeuf Bourguinon.

Walking home, it occurred to me that when it is this cold, almost every bird one sees is a robin.. I must have seen 6 or 7 of them altogether.

Admittedly, I did also see some swans, regal and monochrome on the stream.

And shortly after I returned home, it started to snow. It seems to be settling, and I am determined to stay safe and snug inside. Fortunately I did grocery shopping yesterday, so I have food, and beer, and toilet roll, and cat food, so we should be fine even if the snow is still here tomorrow.

And of course, having been to the library, I also have a good supply of as-yet-unread books.

it could be worse. . .

Current Mood: tired

It is very, very cold.

Not, of course, for those of you in truly cold places such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa, but cold-for-England. It's about -3 celsius, And feels every degree of it.

Lots of parts of the country have had snow - unusually early and heavy. We had a sprinkling on Friday night, and a little more on Monday night - just a few milimetres, but enough, having frozen overnight, to make driving the first little bit of the way to work ....interesting.

On Monday,when I had a day off , I went into Bath to do some Christmas shopping. Bath has a Christmas Market, which runs for about 3 weeks - lot of craftspeople, selling all sorts of lovely things and interesting foodstuffs. I managed to finish off most of my shopping, which is a relief - I like giving people things,and the pleasure of trying to find thibgs which he recipient will really like, but I hate crowds, and don't much like shopping, so shopping in crowds is definitely not my thing!

Then on Thursdaay, having watched most of the rest of the country being half buried in snow, and been lulled into a false sense of security, I woke up to find that it had snowed properly overnight.

I was a little worried, as I was due to go to meeting the other side of Bath, and there are rather a lot of hilly bits in between, but as it turned out, once I got out onto the main road the roads were all pretty clear, and the countryside was looking pretty.

Coming home was less fun, though - I found that the roads leading into my street had had just enough traffic to ensure that the snow had been compacted down into ice, which was starting to freeze...

Driving on an ice rink is not my idea of fun. (At least in my own car and with lots of things to hit) It's forecast to be colder than ever tonight.

Current Mood: cold

(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..