Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - weather

Detecting a certain warmth

2010-05-24T11:38:00+01:00

I arrived back from my whistle-stop tour of southern Africa on Friday morning. By the time I arrived back at home I was good for little more than drifting in and out of consciousness on the sofa while noticing little change in environment. In fact Africa was probably perceived as slightly cooler given they are heading into winter and had a lower humidity.

We had a friend visiting for the weekend who gamely helped Fliss tackle the state of the pond. We decided it was a little unfair on the fishes when we spotted one with pond weed threaded through it's gills. While I busied myself with other tasks (fetching, carrying and other assorted easily instructed operations) the girls donned swimming costumes and hauled out large amounts of pond weed and other general muck. We replaced the waterfall pump with one that doesn't cause the house power to trip out whenever it's turned on. As a result the pond is now looking a lot healthier.

We had both wings of the family over for a BBQ the previous weekend which was mainly consumed indoors due to the rain and wind. This weekend was a full on scorcher that was well suited to the small mound of meat that we sacrificed to the BBQ gods. Considering that people generally look forward to the warming of summer it's kinda ironic I spent most of my time darting from shade to shade and following the cats lethargic lead by staying motionless. Sadly I can't be quite as cute with it.

It looks like it will be cooling down later in the week which is no bad thing. There is probably less chance of being severely burnt the couple of times we hope to make the beer festival this week.

Here comes the Sun

2010-03-15T12:09:00+00:00

The weather this weekend was a lot nicer, not only sunny but also well on the right side of the thermometer. Fliss and I spent Sunday in front of the Grand Prix going through the wedding spreadsheet and started mailing out the wedding invites. However it's already become apparent that we've not been nearly inventive enough with the hidden code. The next one will almost certainly involve a cipher of some sort - although possibly not as advanced as the ones in the xkcd book.

While the Facebook group is a handy solution for those on Facebook we are actually managing the responses via our own website. For those (very few) interested people the hacked up version of the Events Manager plugin can be found on my github pages.

We are up in Manchester next weekend and the following weekend we climb Snowden. It certainly feels like I'm awakening from hibernation. Today was the first day I got into work without having to massage the live back into frozen fingers.

No Snow Yet

2010-01-06T10:43:00+00:00

According to the new live weather map we live in the only part of the country that has dodged the snow bullet so far. That's certainly the impression I get from seeing every ones various social media musings on the matter. No matter the platform we Brits seems to love talking about the weather.

I'm easy about it really, as I can work from home at the drop of a hat and I'm certainly not going to make my life difficult by struggling in if I don't need to. This didn't stop me from using the car to come in today though. It's comforting to be able to nip home in 10 minutes rather than face a 1 hour trudge through freezing water meadows, modulo the time it takes to defrost the car.

EDIT TO ADD: And right on cue the snow finally arrived at midday, we take things easy here on the Fens ;-)