Rain Rain Go Away

The snow has all gone at last, but now we have rain. I think I would rather have snow because I am so sick of rain, it seems as if it has rained with hardly any break for at least a year. I know I am exaggerating, but that is how it feels!

We drove to my mum's on Sunday, it was nice to be able to get around more easily but the rain had washed the snow away and the world looked very dull and bedraggled after the beauty of the snow. The winter jasmine which grows around our door had been looking splendid before the snow came but now 
some of the bright yellow flowers have lost their colour and they look very sorry for themselves. The flowers should stay until March, but it looks as if they are on the way out. 

The River Nene skirts one of the roads that we take on the way to my mum's house, then the road crosses the Nene and heads towards Bedford. The river was very high and in certain parts it had spilled over into the surrounding fields. This time last year we were worried that there had not been enough rainfall (and it has hardly stopped raining since!) but now we have the opposite worry, the last thing we need is more rain.

I don't want this post to seem like a catalogue of moans because there was one bright spot amid the damp and gloomy garden - new shoots! It is only the end of January and no doubt we can look forward to plenty more rain and perhaps more snow too, but we can also look forward to better days ahead because even in our bedraggled and neglected garden we can see the promise of spring!

Ups and Downs

Several weeks ago I wrote about the mishap I had with my mobile phone, it took a tumble into a (newly cleaned) toilet. I dried it straight away and then took it apart and placed it into a zippy bag full of rice to draw the moisture from the phone. It stayed in the rice for a fortnight, but when I tried the phone it still didn't work, so it went back in the rice for another couple of weeks then I too it out again, but the phone was still dead. Before I had a chance to put the phone back in the rice, Meg (the dog) stole the bag of dry rice and ate it all, I was scared she would get badly dehydrated but she survived with no ill effects, I guess I should be grateful that she didn't eat the phone!

The phone was an old friend, it belonged to Eric my first husband, he bought it in 2002 and when he died in 2003 I kept it. I know it is silly sentiment really, but it helps, there was a voice message on it that Eric left when he was messing around with his new phone and I was so sad to lose it. I had also lost lots of texts, my birthday calendar and loads of important numbers. I had another phone but it just wasn't the same. I had given up hope of recovering the data, but a friend said she would take it to a place that had helped her with her phone. Amazingly they got the phone working again, and when I got it back I had a huge grin on my face. In the next few days I will be backing up all the data! It has been a difficult week, but getting my phone and all the data back has means a lot to me.

Windy 24.09.2007

I had a slightly later start than usual this morning, usually I am embarking on my first journey of the day soon after 6.30am but today my bed was warm and comfortable and it was a bit of an effort to force myself into action to face a wet and windy morning. Robbie was also running late, moaning that it was raining hard and his waxed jacket would be too warm, so he would have to get soaked, it was apparently my fault because I stopped him from buying the 'flasher' mac that he had his eye on earlier in the year.

It must have been almost 7am when I left the house and the rain was torrential and I got soaked just running to the car. I was a bit surprised to find that several sets of traffic lights were not working, but I didn't think much of it. The rain was much more manageable within a few minutes. Robbie rang me shortly afterwards to say he was stranded at the station, trains in both directions were at a standstill. I didn't think anything of it until I took Sam to school and drove past Abington Park it was strewn with huge branches and there were leaves and debris all over the road. Laura and I commented that we didn't think it had been that windy, but I continued to notice wind damage including fallen fencing. I later discovered from the local news that we'd had a mini tornado!

http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/Chaos-as-mini-tornado-hits.3225455.jp