It Continues

[poliphilo]

The pundits are scurrying around the TV studios to assure us that present conditions in no way challenge their theories of global warming. I don't believe them.
 
Yesterday temperatures in parts of Britain dropped to within a degree or two of the temperature in Antarctica.

We had to go shopping yesterday or we and the in-laws would have run out of essential supplies- which In my father-in-law's case means Muller fruit corners. The car was nestled into a sort of a bunker outside the house- and I had to dig it out. Then, when we came home at the end of the afternoon, I had to dig it back in again. The roads round town are dodgy and they haven't gritted the sidestreets since the last fall of snow. They haven't collected the rubbish either. We didn't risk driving down Dot and Eric's street. Ailz parked at the top of it and I carried their groceries the final quarter mile on foot.

I'd been warned we might find the supermarket shelves stripped back to the bare metal. This wasn't the case. Sainsbury's Oldham  had all the essentials. A cheery,  "look at us surviving the blitz" spirit was in evidence. A sales assistant we know by sight proudly told us about her walk to work. Christmas puddings were on sale at 75% off- and I treated us to what would have otherwise been a very expensive one. It gave me vivid dreams. 

Comments

[oakmouse]

Yay for the bargain Christmas pudding!

The weather is being rather epic here too. We're having temps in the teens Fahrenheit, and people are terrified that the snowstorm predicted for Sunday, with wind chill factors in the below-zero F range, is going to be the Snowpocalypse. The old guard down at the Masonic lodge, though, say this used to be normal in the 1940s and 1950s, and that it's only since some time in the 60s that the winters got milder than this.

I'm enjoying it except for the task of keeping our steps and walk clean of snow, which we have to do as they're so steep that otherwise the mailman won't come up and we can't get down. But then I work from home and haven't got to commute in it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One of the advantages of growing old is that you acquire historical perspective: you've seen it all before and things just don't scare you as much.

[oakmouse]

I also grew up in Eastern Washington, where it's normal to have 1 to 3 feet of snow on the ground from sometime in November until sometime in March, where residential streets are not plowed, just sanded, where buses run in spite of the snow, and where overnight lows in the minus degrees Fahrenheit are normal in January and February. I know how to deal with all of this because it's how I spent my first 19 winters.