Sunday, December 20, 2009

White Christmas?

It's looking like a possibility. We have snow here, not very deep but extremely cold and once it's been compacted by traffic, it just sets into ice.

I set out to clear the driveway today, so went to fetch a shovel from the shed. The shed lock was encased in ice. I thought I might need a blowtorch or at least some spray de-icer, both of which I have... in the shed.

Since I moved from smoking to electrosmoking, I don't carry a lighter any more. So there followed a frantic rummage to find an old lighter, then some time standing in the cold trying to melt the lock. Since the lighter only works from beneath the lock, every drop that dripped hit the thing and put out the flame. Eventually I managed to get in.

The shovel stays outside, and all the de-icer sprays are now in the house. I also have rock salt. Not the stuff the councils use. This is lab grade stuff and you don't need much, once the snow is scraped away to reveal the ice.

The papers are still full of that terrible, terrible global warming. The same papers tell of 20 inches of snow in Washington and record snowfalls all over the place. Temperatures here are reaching -10C (about 7F) overnight and not getting much above 0C during the day. Global warming? Where's my share?

Forget global warming. Start preparing for an ice age.

11 comments:

Just Peachie said...

LOL. But what is electrosmoking?

Anonymous said...

If it snows for Christmas, that's enough for me all year.

Romulus Crowe said...

JP - electrosmoking is this -

http://www.theelectroniccigarette.co.uk/

It's nicotine without any harmful tars or other chemicals, in any flavour you want. Including absinthe flavour.

No second hand smoke, no smoke at all. Just steam.

It's getting banned in many places anyway because what these people want banned isn't the potential harm. It's the potential enjoyment that irks them.

Romulus Crowe said...

AB - I'd be happy if it didn't snow at all. Tonight is the solstice and it's going to be unpleasant trying to take photos out there.

There's also the Jacobite ghosts on Christmas Eve which I failed to catch last year but want to try again this year, in a different spot (the river's course has moved a little in 400 years so I might have been in the wrong place last time).

Best get the thick woollen clothes out...

Just Peachie said...

So did the Jacobites show?

Romulus Crowe said...

JP - The alleged Jacobite haunting happens either tonight or tomorrow night. This will be my third attempt at this one.

Here's last year's:

http://romuluscrowe.blogspot.com/2008/12/back-to-river.html

It's a local one so it's easy to go and look. There haven't been any recent reported sightings so it could be a waste of time - but it's not wasting very much time.

This year, the weather is far less pleasant than last year.

Just Peachie said...

Well stay as warm as you can. Does weather affect ghostly appearances?

tom sheepandgoats said...

You'll be happy to know that winter has been kind to us thus far. Two weeks ago all the bad people to the north of us were clobbered with an ice-age era storm. Last week the bad people to the south of us were similarly punished by another monster. But we here in Rochester are sitting pretty and have had only two or three inches....wait a minute, what do you call those things where you come from? Ah, yes, centimeters....of the white stuff all season

tom sheepandgoats said...

HA! Another epoch storm dumping snow everywhere but here, even (southern) Dallas Texas, which hasn't seen a white Christmas in 80years.

"It's going to be one of them days," Deputy Jesse Swenson said. "Everybody wanted a white Christmas — and they got it." (isn't that astrological Southern Writer from Texas? If so, she's buried under)

But not here in Rochester. Raining & plenty of green visible outside my window (that could change, but too soon to tell)

This guy somewhere was stranded on Christmas eve. He's quoted this way:

"This is mine and my wife's first Christmas together, so she's not very excited," he said.

Romulus Crowe said...

Tom - no global warming here. The street looks like someone parked a glacier on it. It's impossible even to walk on.

I still doggedly use inches, even though the metric system was in place all through school. I'm of the generation where the two are interchangeable because we had to learn the imperial units first, then switched to metric.So I can use whichever makes the measurements easier.

Now the EU has taken over, it'll soon be illegal to use anything but their metric measurements.

I'll do it anyway.

Romulus Crowe said...

JP - Ghosts seem to be linked to infrared wavelengths and electrical energy but nobody really knows how. There are a lot of ghosts linked to the charged atmosphere before and during thunderstorms.

I don't know if the weather affects the actual ghost, but it seems to affect their ability to appear.

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