30 August 2010 13:33
The weather forecaster is saying that there is a chance of a ground frost tomorrow. If that is the case then it means that there hasn’t been a frost free month during the whole of the last year.
It’s feeling distinctly chilly now and the trees in my garden are all beginning to look autumnal. I like autumn, in fact it’s my favourite season, but when we’ve had hardly any summer weather at all it’s only natural that you hope for a bit of an ‘Indian Summer’ in September.
I think it’s a bit of a forlorn hope though and I’m beginning to wonder why I bothered to change from the winter duvet to the summer one. Maybe next year I won’t do it and that will guarantee us a sweltering summer! By sweltering I mean about 70F.
Nowadays autumn seems to last for only a few days and then we go straight into winter with a BANG. But I always think of John Keats now and his Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Ode to Autumn
20 August 2010 12:20
I’ve been busy this week trying to catch up with all the things around the house and garden which are neglected during the school holidays. So I’ve been hard at it cutting back a lot of growth in the garden which is mainly the result of the amount of rain which we’ve had recently. This time last year I ended up with a frozen shoulder because I overdid it in the garden and by Christmastime I could hardly move my arm at all, so I’ve stuck to using the pruners and steered well clear of the saws.
I didn’t even get around to reading The Guardian so this morning I did some catching up. We always buy The Guardian but you can get most of it on-line I think. Unfortunately they don’t put the cryptic crossword on the site and we both love doing the crossword, it’s a bit of an addiction really.
There was an interesting article about biofuel. They are experimenting with by-products of the whisky making industry at Edinburgh Napier University. Apparently it can be used in cars without having to adapt their engines. Sounds good. I’m wondering what it smells like. It would be fine if it smells like the finished product, but some of the smells created by distilling whisky aren’t so good.
I was brought up in a distillery town where they made Ballantines, J&B and many more, but the smell could be pretty nasty at times.
I’ve heard that if you adapt your car to run on old cooking oil from fish and chip shops then the exhaust fumes have that distinctive chippy aroma. Very confusing if you’re in need of a fish supper and you don’t know where your nearest chippy is. You used to be able to rely on your nose to sniff one out!
14 August 2010 21:13
As we are nearly at the end of the school holidays here, we thought it was about time we made a mad dash over to the west of Scotland and luckily the weather was lovely, as it still is. It is about 60 F I suppose which is fine for me because I can’t stand the heat and I feel so sorry for people sweating in 80 or 90 F. I don’t know how you manage to do anything at all.
But the best thing is the sun has been shining now because we’ve had so much rain this summer, almost as bad as last year and the year before. One woman said to me that she rates summers by how many BBQs she’s had – 1 last year, and 2 this year apparently.
I’ve got a feeling that the weather forecasters are always saying that the best of the weather is in the west, which is strange because the west of Scotland is famous for high rainfall. I’m going to start keeping a note of the rainfall patterns, I think it’s changing.
I predict that we’ll have the best weather of the whole summer in the next few weeks, because that’s what usually happens when the kids go back to school.
Ah well, I suppose it means that I’ll be able to get some of the jobs done around the house and garden that we haven’t been able to do because of the weather.
I’m not going up on the roof though, I think I’ll get a professional in for that one!
11 August 2010 00:24
The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.
Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.
But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.
So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.
The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.
So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!
17 June 2010 22:01
I’m not complaining, honestly. But suddenly it’s really warm again, almost too hot, and the forecast for the weekend is good. That’s nearly a miracle.
The down side of this is that the midges are out and biting by the millions. It’s especially bad near any lochs.
We had been hoping that the horrendous winter would have killed a lot of the wee blighters off. What they think has happened is that the midges survived the cold but the birds and bats which would normally eat the midges, didn’t do so well during the snow and ice.
Unfortunately, human beings are top of the midge menu.