It's the hottest day of the year and I want to be in the garden/have all the windows open.
So of course three doors down are replacing their garden fence by drilling out the old concrete.
*headdesk*
And they're being incredibly inefficient at it, this is day two and they only have one post up so far.
Argh, and now my next-door neighbour is mowing her lawn. I'd say 'mad-dogs and Englishmen', but she's South African.
Catching up on the local news after my post about Storm Eunice, I found out that the wind, which reached 70mph locally (which equates to Violent Storm on the Beaufort scale, and just short of Hurricane force) had shut down the port of Dover, plus all train services in Kent, which would have been a distinct bugger if you'd made it into London in the morning! And more spectacularly that the middle chimney of three at Grain Power Station, which is about five miles from me, had blown down, forcing the 1.2GW power station to shut down. Fortunately this is the new gas-fired station, with much shorter chimneys than the 801ft tall one at the old oil-fired station, which, until it was blown up in 2016 was the second highest chimney in the UK. (Though it seems like at least half the local and national press thinks it was the 801ft one).
I didn't get out yesterday (it was chucking it down with rain), but did take the car out for a run at lunchtime today (it hadn't been out in it in 10 days) to get it in before the next storm, which it turns out has shifted its track north since I last checked, and picked up a name, so Storm Franklin is now due to hit Northern Ireland later, rather than us this afternoon.
I basically did a Vee, up the road to the airfield, down the other side to Rochester and back, just far enough to put a bit of charge on the battery. I noticed a couple of trees missing on the road on the way up, one with a six-eight inch trunk snapped off a couple of feet above ground level and a smaller one, two to three inches, that had been chainsawed off at about the four feet mark - presumably it had been sticking into the road.
Coming down the backside of the airfield the road is on the edge of a valley, with a small patch of woodland along the exposed edge.and I had to dodge into the middle of the road half a dozen times because of trees down in the woods that were just projecting into the road - it was as if someone had planted a bush in the gutter.
But it was on the way back, coming down the Chatham side of the airfield that made me go "Whoa!!!". While it's by the airfield there are big retail units (PC World, Homebase etc - so warehouse size) separating the road from the airfield, so it isn't totally exposed. But in a half mile stretch of road I passed three single-pole traffic signs that had been snapped off at the base, and two double-pole signs that had been bent back at 45 degrees. Wow!
And looking out of the window while talking to my mother on the phone after I got back, I spotted that the three old fence-posts I have dug in at 45 degrees as safety props against one of the fence panels at the bottom of the garden (as it once flexed so much in a gale it popped out of the vertical posts) had all been knocked sideways. I've been out and kicked them back into place, but the ground is sodden, so if Storm Franklin has decided to give us a miss then that's probably just as well.
I heard the outriders of Storm Eunice about 5AM, but got to sleep and when I surfaced at 11-ish it was in full spate. The wind noise was loud enough that I turned on some music to try and drown it out because I was wincing every time a gust hit the house. And I wasn't too keen on the way the trees at the bottom of the garden were being blown about either - the trunks are a couple of feet across and they were tossing like reeds - it's a good job they aren't in leaf yet.
I'd say it blew itself out about 3-30-4PM, but we're still being hit by odd gusts three hours later (and there's now rain tossing down as well).
I think the house survived okay - I need to take a look at the roof tomorrow in the daylight - but bits and pieces from everyone's gardens have been randomly re-distributed around the street. I had to throw some shoes on and rush outside as soon as I glanced into the back garden about 11:30, there was a big green tarp thrashing itself to death against my french windows. I shoved it behind the shed for the afternoon and confirmed with my neighbour that it's actually his when we spoke about 5PM. My other neighbour has an even bigger tarp in her garden that's blown in from her next door neighbour's, so that's one being blown northwards and one southwards within about 50 feet of each other.
But everything's minor compared to some of the pictures on the news, I think it's the first time I've seen "Train delayed due to station roof on tracks", and it had happened at least twice.
I checked in with my mother, who was well north of the worst of the storm, and they'd had a light dusting of snow several times during the day, though she was a bit worried that the winds were picking up there since dark.
The weather here today has been weird.
It hammered down with rain last night from about 2AM til 6AM (and has been doing it again pretty much since dark), but by noon we had blue skies, temperatures pushing an unseasonal 20C, and a howling gale. This is an unusual combination.
Given the gale I decided I'd pass on doing anything in the garden and curled up with a good book, at which point I promptly heard a dull thud.
It wasn't that loud a thud, but I thought I'd better check. So I wandered through to the back bedroom, looked out and spotted that my patio table had blown over. Given it's glass topped I'm pretty impressed it survived undamaged. And clearly it had blown over because the wind had caught its furled umbrella, which I was still using just last week.
So I had to throw on outdoor clothes, find some shoes and hurry out to put things to rights before anything more happened - table back upright, dismantle umbrella, store umbrella indoors. At which point my neighbour, out checking her washing, pointed out some minor damage to the garden fence that separates our gardens. The top bit of wood on one of the panels, mainly there to shield it from rain IMO, has rotted through and the wind had torn a lump of it off, leaving several nails sticking up. She suggested fixing it with some scrap wood that's left over from a panel her husband replaced earlier in the summer (he's working away right now), but that wasn't even close, so I said I'd do it as I knew I had some wood in the shed that was about the right size.
So off I trot to find the wood and a hammer, then spend half an hour or so levering out old nails, removing the rest of the rotted bit, and then nailing the new bit in place. (I did have the police helicopter hovering overhead for about five minutes in the middle of that, clearly they thought fence repairs in the middle of a gale either suspicious, or stupid). And that worked, job done.
But standing where I was to do it made it readily apparent that the jasmine bush needed pruning, not only was the weight of growth pulling it away from the fence, but it had managed to stretch out and snare one of the patio chairs. So there was nothing to do but go and find the secateurs and give that a good pruning, half-filling the gardening recycling bin.
And when that was finally done, I came in, picked up my book again, and promptly fell asleep.
So my attempts to view today's partial annular solar eclipse in the UK were less than successful.
I did manage to wake up in time, despite not managing to get any sleep before 7AM, but then spent the better part of an hour searching for my proper eclipse viewing filter bought for the near total eclipse back in 1999. I found the booklet it came in/with, but not the filter itself. So I then quickly threw together a pin-hole camera with remote viewing screen (aka the box from a dozen cans of cider and a sheet of printer paper). By that point I'd missed the peak by about 5 minutes, and by the time I got outside and tried it all that I could see was a small arc clipped off the lower right quadrant (flipped by the pinhole, so actually upper left). I decided the pinhole was a bit big for clear viewing - it was more of a pin-slot - popped inside to get some tape to cut it down to size, but in the time it took to do that the sun disappeared behind clouds and there wasn't enough light getting through to form an image. And it's still behind clouds an hour later.
Bah.
Apparently maximum coverage in London*, and I'm close enough to make no difference, was 20%, and I didn't notice any significant change in light levels, certainly nothing like the eerie false twilight of a total eclipse.
* Rising to about 30% further North.
(aka 98.6F)
I had a late lunch on the patio, French windows completely open, book, nice glass of wine. Bliss
But come 4PM I felt like I needed a break from the sun, so came inside, did a few minutes on the computer, then decided "Nope, I need a nap for an hour", so stretched out on my face on the bed.
It was pretty much 9PM when I woke up. Whoops. Not only was my neck unhappy with being stuck in one position for 5 hours, but the french windows were still completely wide to the world. Double whoops. Thank god my back garden is secluded.
Now not only do I have to contend with the heat when I try to sleep tonight, but with already having had 5 hours.
In a totally unrelated discussion with my sister.
Her: "There's a hose being raffled. Do you want £10 worth".
Me: "A hose?!? Sure you don't mean a horse*?"
Her: "A house! They're emigrating and can't sell. Fruppint autocript!"
* Bishop Auckland has a reputation of being the stray horse capital of the country. This is not a joke.
The clocks went forward last night, so we're now on British Summer Time.
The weather has celebrated this morning by pelting my windows with hail, while my sister up in Durham reports a heavy frost, sleet and some snow.
Nothing to see here, British weather following its normal patterns....
I took in a parcel for Les next door on Friday, and when he picked it up he mentioned that he'd had to hop over the fence on Thursday to save Arthur (other side next door)'s fence, which was in the process of blowing down and destroying itself (it was a wee bit windy). I had actually looked out onto the garden that morning, but this time I went and put my glasses on before doing it. Welp, three panels gone out of 10 or 11, and by 'gone' I mean 3x3" fence poles snapped off, not just panels popped. Hey, new open plan garden! (Fortunately for my wallet Arthur's fence, mine is the one on Les's side).
( Helping, sort of... )
Lunch in Town
So, as I said, I went into town to have lunch, for only the second time this year, I think - this blasted cold has been really limiting. So I had a nice plate of fish and chips in my usual place, and when I'd finished, went to get my wallet out of my bag to pay for my meal.
Look into bag, notice there's no sign of my house keys.
Check pockets, not there.
Empty bag onto table, not there.
Check pockets again, still not there.
Check bag again, still not there.
Crap, they're probably either still in the front door, or dropped onto the ground beside the car when I got the chair out.
So I hurry back to the car, open my bag to get the car keys out, first thing I see is the house keys.
I emptied the blasted bag onto the table, how could I miss them!
Currently Reading
Planetside, Michael Mammay
Like me, Mike's one of the Pitchwars 2015 alumni, though unlike me his novel got picked up and has been out for a few months (IIRC Locus said it was the best selling SF paperback of the month back in September). I've been meaning to read it for ages, but never got around to it until he mentioned the sequel in the PW2015 group the other day. I was wanting something new to read, so I popped over to Amazon to order it, and it's really good.
Carl Butler is a colonel in SpaceCommand (and self-professed asshole), and on the edge of retirement, so close that he's been attached to Student Command because by the time he's been shipped in cryo to any operational deployment he'd have passed retirement age. But then he gets a call from General Serata, second in command of SpaceCom and a long time friend. A politician's son and SpaceCom Lieutenant has gone MIA out on a planet Carl has history with, and it's not a straightforward MIA - he was put on a medevac flight up to the orbiting base after a firefight, but wasn't on it when it arrived. In return for a few favours (relocating Carl's family home to his wife's home planet) he wants Carl to head out and investigate.
So a rather grumpily put-upon Carl (like he says, he's an asshole), picks up an aide (Serata's, who needs some front-line time), and a personal protection officer, and heads off (stuffed in cryo) to Cappa. Problems start even before they arrive, because they drop into the system four days out, not the normal two, almost like someone wanted extra time to be ready for them. Arriving on the orbiting base, Carl finds a less than friendly welcome. Colonel Stirling, the SpaceCom commander, sees him as a rival/in a position to damage his career, Colonel Elliot, the MedCom commander, won't even let him into the hospital wing, and Colonel Karikov, the Special Forces commander (who missing politician's son had been seconded to), is down on the planet and hasn't been up to the station in institutional memory. Things deteriorate from there.
The deeper Carl digs, the more disturbing things become, because there's something more than just a missing Lt going on, and it's clear Serata's sent Carl to fix it, whatever it may be, and whatever it may take. Worse, Carl doesn't know who to trust, including the usefully competent major who may be reporting to Stirling,and the journalist who clearly knows something's amiss. Things soon escalate, witnesses disappear, Carl's attacked (which at least gets him into the hospital), and a trip down to try and see the SF commander turns into a Cappan ambush which leaves his aide hospitalised (which again is a useful way into the hospital). Ultimately Carl digs deep enough to realised just what an utter disaster is unfolding, and then he's faced with the question of how far he's prepared to go to fix it.
It's not a book that takes a deep look at the opposition, the Cappans are very much hostile ciphers, nor is it really conventional SF milfic, because there's actually very little combat, one short sequence, and then a somewhat larger one that acts as an Oh Shit! ex machina. Thematically it has much more in common with thrillers set against a military background, such as The General's Daughter, or even A Few Good Men, and with works about being in the military, such as Heartbreak Ridge. If there's a more combat-oriented story that does get a nod, then it's Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness. But it is a story that clearly resonates with Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's a book that absolutely nails the life in the military side, which perhaps has something to do with with Mike Mammay being ex-Colonel Mammay, US Army, with a resume going all the way back to Somalia and Desert Storm.
Up next: Knife Children, Lois McMaster Bujold - a stand-alone novella in the Sharing Knife world.
Currently Playing
I'm not saying Wednesday's Ark session was an utter disaster, or even the same utter disaster repeated three times, but there's a reason I rolled back to Tuesday's back-up.
The weather seems to be turning a little wilder, if still on the mild side for the time of year, I may have timed my return South just right. It's extremely unusual to spend Christmas up here without snow on the ground at any point (I suppose we did have the icefall from Storm Deidre, but that came and went in just a few hours).
I've finished the first draft of Disruptive Technologies, which ultimately came in at about 9200 words. With A Leg to Stand On at 3500, that means I've written the better part of 13,000 words over the holidays (and heavily edited another 6000 more) and takes the number of short stories completed in the last 12 months up to 3, with another significantly reworked. I've never been a prolific short fiction writer, so that may well be my highest annual total. And it may not be finished yet. I'm still not sure how serious I'm going to be about completing Phantom Leg, but it crept up to 450 words last night, I have a plan for it, it's interesting to write out of my comfort zone (it's technically YA) and it all works as character background whether finished or not. First priority back home is going to be some research to back up the drone stuff in Disruptive Technologies. I have the background to bullshit convincingly, but I should check my facts. And then I need to sit down and seriously consider whether it will work even better at novel length.
Recent Reading:
The Furthest Station, Ben Aaronovitch. A spate of people being harassed by ghosts on the Metropolitan Line takes PC Peter Grant, his oppo Sergeant Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police, and Peter's teenage cousin Abigail, the Folly's one girl youth auxiliary, out to the wilds of suburbia, where there are junior genius loci to be encountered, and kidnap victims to be rescued. Not bad, but I felt overpriced at £4.99 for an ebook novella, when there plenty of full novels going for the same price point, And I'm not paying £8.99 for the other series novella nor £9.99 for the latest novel. I'll wait until the ebooks drop to a more reasonable price. Though I may pick up the graphic novels now the comics have been compiled into single volumes.
A comment I forgot to make when reviewing the rest of the series, Aaronovitch is meticulous in explicitly labeling white characters as white,not leaving us to assume that's the default, and everyone gets the same level of facial description, whatever their ethnicity.. I'm slightly less impressed by his insistence on Peter using the 'Me and' construction, which even if Peter grew up using I don't think he'd be universal about after six years with the Met. A mix of "Me and X", and "X and I", would seem more convincing to me (and less irritating), A possibly irritating development in the novella are footnotes marked "Note for Reynolds" explaining various British-isms - possibly the American readership has been struggling.
*Reynolds is the Dana Sculley lookalike FBI agent Peter's encountered in a couple of the books.
It was interesting to watch the first episode of Manhunt last night (a new crime drama recreating a prominent London murder case), and realise what a good job Aaronovitch has done within the series of showing how a murder enquiry starts up and works.
Next up, The Mortal Word, Genevieve Cogman, the next in the Invisible Library series, though I'd better find something else as well, or I'll run out of things to read on the train..
Another day with crystal clear skies and several hours spent in the garden in shirt sleeves, in fact I only came in at 6:30PM and it was dark at 7PM. It was getting a little cold at the end there - so I pulled on the hoodie I'd had drying on the line for the last 20 minutes of it- but it was hot enough earlier I had to take off the light jacket I'd thrown on while running an errand.
I couldn't help tying this in with the new IPCC climate change report: "So, puny humans, you have discovered my evil plan, but see how effortlessly I turn an autumn day into a sunny summer one, resistance is futile!"
I would actually have spent more time outside, but when I went upstairs to get my kindle I noticed that the house across the main road from my back garden and two up was being visited by four police officers, two squad cars, and one emergency ambulance. I'd first noticed the first pair of cops about two thirty, the other pair turned up while I was out on an errand, so probably an hour later, and the ambulance appeared between me driving past them on my way home and making it upstairs about five minutes later, so I'd have heard, and probably seen if it had turned up with lights and sirens. So I stayed watching for a while, and filling all the 'nothing's happening' with browsing the web. Of course they all sloped off about four thirty while I wasn't looking - I saw the original pair of cops leave, but not the ambulance or the second squad car. The householder came out immediately afterwards to close their gate and their neighbours practically teleported to the fence to interrogate them on what was happening.
You're lucky to get one uniformed cop for a burglary, so four for several hours suggests something pretty serious, but no plainclothes officers, yet an ambulance is a weird combination.
I just spent the afternoon sitting in the garden in shirtsleeves. Even better my next door neighbour was barbecuing and passed a beer and a plate of food across the fence.
It is the 5th of October. Nature is wrong.
But apparently not me.
I've been feeling fairly miserable since the heatwave started, where I normally do distinctly better in hot weather. Some advice from a couple of friends, including ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett suggested that the headaches that had been plaguing me every morning might mean I was drinking enough water to take me through the day, but falling short overnight, and that I might also want to think about whether I was also getting enough salt - which given I was having one of my periodic bouts of not eating salty snacks was probably a good suggestion. I've now laid in a supply of salty snacks and made sure I'n drinking enough. There were some signs of improvement the next morning, then the weather broke. (And that was fairly disappointing - a couple of rumbles of thunder in the distance, not the spectacular we were led to expect).
Sunday and Monday were wet and windy throughout, Tuesday was unpleasantly sticky, today is apparently headed for 26c - not extreme, but warm. My sister's flying off to the sun today, whereas I'm thinking "maybe it'll be cooler when I head North at the end of the month".
Disgruntledly yours...
So with Hurricane/ex-Hurricane/Maybe-Still- a-Hurricane-but-predicted-to-be-a-Tropical-Storm-Real-Soon-Now Ophelia due to hit the British Isles tomorrow I thought I'd better finish off the re-roofing of the garden shed - I replaced the felt over the summer, but never got around to replacing the battens on the gable ends, which are an extra protection against the wind getting underneath and ballooning the felt off. Surprisingly this only took me 20 minutes, but I had a smile on my face when I realised this literally amounted to 'battening down the hatches', even if I was doing it to a roof, not a hatchway..
I'm not actually expecting trouble tomorrow, there isn't even a severe weather warning for the south east as far as I can see, Ophelia's due to hit entirely the other side of the country, in fact entirely the other side of the next country over, but it needed doing before we get much further into autumn, so it's a good excuse.
Of course the problem with leaving it until the last minute and then deciding to do it is I hadn't gotten around to painting/weatherproofing the wood, and I do want to do every side, not just the exposed ones, because the wood I'm replacing had rotted from the back. So it's all going to have to come off again for a quick paint job once the winds have died down.
Adding to people's concern is that it's 30 years since the 1987 Great Storm, which did hit the South East. There were multiple trees down at the end of my road, one of them on top of a friend's car (though I didn't know her then), but I managed to sleep completely through it, bar the five minutes at god-awful o'clock in the morning when I stumbled downstairs to slam the front door, which had been blown open. I'll settle for sleeping through Ophelia as well.
I went out on my normal Saturday afternoon coffee date earlier. Though since it's the summer I'm not drinking coffee and I was on my own as both the friends who normally join me have serious health stuff going on with family members, so not much of a 'date' either.
Anyway, I drove over to Rochester and as I got closer I noticed the skies darkening. As I parked up the rain started falling, as I got the chair out of the car the thunder started, and by the time I'd stuck the wheels on it was raining pretty heavily. And there was me in just shirtsleeves. So I zipped down onto the high street as fast as I could, and on the bright side the rebuilding I've done on the eBay chair this week makes it handle a lot better, and it's still massively better than the clown chair in terms of ride across Rochester's fetish for bricked roads, cobbles and heritage paving.
I slowly dried out once I was at the George, and what do you know, the thunder stopped and the rain died away. On the bright side my meal was pretty damned good, I went for the special, which was a chunk of salmon the size of my paired fists on a bed of pappardelle pasta with baby tomatoes roasted on the vine and olives. Yummy. Having looked it up, technically, the pasta probably wasn't wide enough to be pappardelle, more of a fettucine, really, but it was liberally herbed and pretty damned tasty. On the negative side they did have the TV screens behind the bar tuned to Brexit news, but they have the sound off and subtitles on, so mostly I could ignore that.
So I paid up and headed out. I'd no sooner set the chair down on the pavement (drawback to the George is both its entrances are up steps), than the rain started again, and as I got to the car the thunder was rolling in again. Soaked for a second time. And of course the clouds followed me home. In fact it was raining so heavily I sat in the car on the drive for 20 minutes in the hope it might ease off before making a dash to the door.
Four hours later and it's still peeing down! You've got to love the British summer.
timeasmymeasure
