Category Archives: Weather

A Snowy Beveridge Park

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We managed to get a wee bit of a walk around this park today and for some reason it was almost deserted. What has happened to all the kids?

Maybe they’ve been busy playing in the park all week as the schools were closed and they’re fed up with it all now, but there wasn’t any evidence of them, no snowmen at all. Had they all been dragged to the shops by parents keen to get Christmas shopping done?

As you can see, the pond has frozen over and there were footprints in the snow which is on top of the ice but it really isn’t safe to walk on it as I’m sure it isn’t thick enough.

The weather forecast is predicting another very cold week ahead for us so it might be as bad as last year was. You can see here a photograph of the park which was taken during the Christmas holidays last year.

This is the refurbished fountain which had to be taken apart during the so called summer because somebody forgot to turn the water off last year and the resulting ice must have damaged it. It doesn’t look nearly so nice now and I suppose it’ll take a few years for it to weather nicely.

Strangely there doesn’t seem to be nearly so much snow in the park as there is in the streets and gardens.

Weather update

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According to the news report tonight it’s colder here than it is in Iceland and Scandinavia, we seem to have got all their snow, but it doesn’t feel too bad when you’re out walking in it. By the time we trudged through the snow from the town today we actually felt too hot, we were laden with more household necessities for Duncan’s new place.

There hasn’t been much snow today and we’re hoping that we’ll be able to drive through to Dundee tomorrow with more stuff and maybe order ‘white goods’ – the most boring things, to my mind anyway.

However, the temperature here is set to plummet to -6 degrees Celsius which I believe is 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit. So the roads are just going to ice up completely and it might be too dodgy to venture out in the car.

The schools are still closed and I’m sure they won’t be open tomorrow, they’ve only ever been closed for two days in a row before but we have had it a lot colder, in the past we’ve suffered -18 degrees Celsius and the fact that there isn’t much wind at the moment is good but on the other hand I suppose that’s why we’ve got this weather front stuck over us and going nowhere.

I’m glad that we aren’t any further north though because it’s going to be -27 degrees Celsius tonight, which is -16.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m sure a lot of people have to cope with weather a lot worse than this but we just aren’t used to snow which stays around for a while. When I was a wee girl we didn’t have snow for years and years, which I was quite happy about because on the rare occasion when it did snow – it turned to slush in about half an hour.

This is the fourth bad winter that we’ve had in a row so it looks like we’re going to have to get used to it in the future.

Win-terrrrr

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We just had to bite the bullet yesterday and despite the horrendous weather we hired a van and made our way to the flat pack furniture shop beloved by many that is Ikea. The journey there was pretty hairy because so much snow had fallen. Duncan has taken the week off work and as luck would have it all of the schools in Fife are closed so my husband was able to drive the van. The worst nasty moment was when we crashed into a roundabout and ended up spinning around and pointing in the wrong direction but we managed to get out of that situation and carried on to Edinburgh.

Our plans for a leisurely look around the store and having a late lunch there before buying everything required were shot to bits when they announced that the store was closing in one hour not long after we got there. So it was a mad dash roung gathering up beds and bookcases and such before being chucked out and having to brave the roads again.

It was a slow journey back to Kirkcaldy with the snow coming at us, on and off. Then when we got back home we just threw some food down our necks, loaded some more stuff into the van and set off for Dundee and Duncan’s new flat.

I hate roundabouts. We skated around them and at times it was really terrifying as the van didn’t really like any change in direction, it’s just lucky that there was hardly anybody else on the roads. The snow was even worse when we got to Dundee and the van got stuck in the entrance road to Duncan’s place so we just had to unload all the stuff and trudge through the snow which was about a foot deep. Then up to the second floor flat – no fun at all.

My husband said we’re getting too old for such shenanigans, and I think he might be right. We had to dig ourselves out in the end, with the help of some very good neighbours and a dog.

The journey back to Kirkcaldy was very scary especially when a blizzard hit us and we couldn’t even see the road at times. I dreaded seeing the lights of up-coming roundabouts in the distance. But we made it, and returned the hired van unscathed.

During that marathon journey in three different counties we only saw one snow plough and it had the plough bit raised so it wasn’t doing anything. We saw no gritters at all.

We had to travel across the scary Forth Road Bridge twice yesterday, but today it has been closed for the first time since it was opened in 1962 – which just shows you how bad the weather has been. It’s quite depressing really as we have a long way to go till the end of the winter. It used to be very rare for us to get snow before Christmas but winter seems to come earlier each year now – and stays with us longer, and summer is non-existent.

This is a photo of a very disgruntled bird which appeared in my garden after our first fall of snow. I think it’s a snipe, but I’m not sure. I’ve never seen a bird like this here before, it’s definitely some sort of wading bird and the poor thing seemed to think that the snow was sand because it kept poking its enormous bill into it and was very disappointed to find nothing it could eat.

Weather update

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We’ve been struggling against really high winds for the last week or so. The big problem for ‘the high heid yins’ was- How are we going to stop the red carpet from blowing away when the Pope lands at Edinburgh airport for his state visit?

In the end they had to give up the idea of a red carpet altogether. The wind had died down a lot by the time the Pope got here although I heard recently that Britain is the windiest place in the world, so it probably seemed bad to people used to a more moderate climate.

The week before last we had lovely sunny weather and it only rained during the night and early in the morning, in fact it was nearly that mythical ‘Indian summer’ that we’re all always hoping for.

But tonight we were out and about in Dundee, helping our eldest with his hunt for a flat there and it was absolutely freezing, there’s a ground frost expected in places. Hopefully not here though because I haven’t got the tender plants in from the garden yet.

Weather update

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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

Catching up

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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!

Weather update

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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!

Tidying Up

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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!

Weather update

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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.