When it rains heavily (particularly when it does so at night) having the animals becomes distinctly harder work than any other time. This weekend has been a perfect demonstration of that – we had a proper thunderstorm on Saturday night / Sunday morning, and heavy rain last night/this morning.
Hound has decided that heavy rain equals Thunder, and skitters round the room to lay next to my side of the bed. I don’t mind this too much – she’s been really good this weekend on this score, without getting stressy and stupid, let alone trying to burrow through the wall as she has done on previous occasions. But she still makes enough noise to wake me up, which isn’t great. Saturday night we ended up moving into the living room again (for some reason one of Hound’s “safe places”) because it was proper thunder etc., and it’s easier to have her in there than down the side of the bed.
Sunday night we had heavy rain, so Hound came round to my side of the bed again. This time though it was Psycho Cat that was the pain in the arse – having got utterly soaked, he decided that the best way to warm up and dry off was to snug into the back of my knees, and then turn round repeatedly so that everything dried off evenly. It has to be said that there is little worse than being woken up by the sensation of cold wet cat fur in the back of your nice warm legs.
The little shit even then went back out again once he dried off and warmed up, and was whining again by 7am that he was cold and wet and why wouldn’t anyone do anything. I seriously wonder sometimes whether it wouldn’t be easier to just drown the little fucker and be done with it.
So all told
Last night (technically this morning) Hound woke us up with full-on security barks. All very much “There’s an intruder, there’s someone/thing in the garden, something’s wrong, wake up!”
It meant I needed to get up, check the house, let her out into the garden to check what was going on, and all that crap.
It turned out – so far as we can tell – that the security issue was heavy rain, which she expected to turn into thunder. I took her basket into the living room, and spent the rest of the night on the sofa, with Hound in her basket.
She was obviously stressed about it though, as the first hour or so was spent with her right by the sofa, as close to me as possible without being on the sofa. A definite sign of stressy Hound.
It’s a good job that the sofa and chair we bought earlier this year are comfortable, and a good size. Between us we spend an inordinate amount of nights (or at least part-nights) on the damn sofa.
This morning the weather while driving was truly fucking foul – icy, heavyish snowfall (heavy for the UK anyway) and a few dollops of fog to just top it off.
And yet still there was a significant percentage of drivers who didn’t have any lights on whatsoever. Well into double figures during my drive this morning. There were even more with only one working headlight, but at least they had one light working.
I simply don’t understand the logic that says “I don’t need to use lights”, although I suppose it’s something similar to the entire “Problem [x] will never happen to me”. I just think it’s another example of where people really should be done more regularly for driving without due care and attention.
All of last night we were getting told about severe weather warnings for Norfolk, that we were going to get heavy snow and ice overnight.
From this story in the EDP (Eastern Daily Press)…
The Met Office is forecasting wintry showers across the region, and has issued a severe weather warning for Norfolk and Suffolk as it believes that rain will turn to snow early on Wednesday with the risk of heavy falls at times.
Road users are being advised to plan their journeys before they set out, check the forecast and road conditions and leave extra time for their journeys if travel conditions are poor.
And this morning, this is what we’ve got…
Yep, that was serious snow. Honest.
Sometimes you just sit gobsmacked at the stupidity of people…
You might want to try scraping the snow off before leaving
Not seen by me, but instead featured on this story on Sky News (and other locations) with the photo provided by Devon police.
Apparently the person driving (an old woman) was told off, and given an ice scraper.
What with the weather and how work has been this year so far, we’re taking this weekend as a quiet one.
It makes sense in a lot of ways – we’ve still got a bundle of snow outside which is making driving entertaining, to say the least. (Both my experience of driving last night and this morning bears that out nicely) We’ve got enough food, don’t need anything, so don’t need to go out and do anything else this weekend.
And lo, a quiet one beckons.
One of the coolest images from the current spate of cold and snowy weather has to be this satellite shot of the UK by NASA…
Click for the larger version
And for a much bigger version (at a scale of 250m instead of the 1km scale above) you can go here, but it’s a big image. (3Mb in size)
