November Snow

It really is no joke having snow this early in a winter - well, still officially Autumn I suppose, until 1st December. The temperatures have been perishing too - at least minus 11 a couple of nights ago and quite possibly colder since. It began snowing on Friday morning, just as we were driving our son into town for work. In no time at all we were in the thick of a blizzard, and it carried on, unrelenting, whilst we dashed around Tesco's, stocking up on anything we thought we might get short on - though we do carry a good storecupboard.

It really DOESN'T take much snow to cause total upheaval here. On Friday for instance, it took us HALF AN HOUR just to get out of the Tesco car park. In fact, it took ten minutes to actually join the queue to GET out as for once we were parked where we would have to reverse out. It took us, in all, an hour and a half to get home as town was gridlocked. Crazy. Even then we had to abandon the car at the bottom of our hill as we couldn't get up it.

The side roads still aren't good - frozen compacted snow for long stretches where the winter sun never gets. Passable if you drive very carefully. Normally we would just shut the front gate and wait it out, but now we have to try and get our offspring into work. I sat up until 1 a.m. on Saturday morning waititng for our middle daughter to get home safely from her pub job. Our son is supposed to be going on a course in Bristol tomorrow and has to be in town for SIX A.M. to meet the chap who he's going with and will be driving them there and back . . . As there is supposed to be more snow tonight, that may not be possible . . .

As for how cold this house is, well, suffice it to say that unless you're by the wood burner, outside clothes are necessary (hat included) and life is rather miserable. The kitchen was 9 degrees Celcius this morning and the cats looked very disgruntled . . . We kidnapped the kittens last night and they spent the night in the shower room, and were SO happy to be in the relative warm (it has been at least minus 11 and below the last few nights). They were purring like grampusses . . .

Now we have a section of pipe frozen, which is causing problems, so my poor husband has to go and dig it up. It's a fresh junction he put in this year, so we are going to use the poorest fleece I was given for spinning this year (I had 6 in all) and use that in a bin liner to try and insulate the pipes.

The birds are desperate for food, and I am glad we got a sack each of seed and peanuts in just a few days before. Someone was writing somewhere about NOT feeding the birds as it encouraged rats, made them a target for cats and sparrowhawks, spread e-Coli and stopped the birds being good at foraging. I am sorry, but if we hadn't fed the birds last winter dozens would have died - I used to come down to up to 26 blackbirds each morning, plus countless Blue- and Great Tits, Chaffinches, Sparrows, Robins, Wrens et al.

I used to love the snow, but the last couple of winters have shown how difficult it makes life and right now, I would be happy to return to warmer and wetter winters . . .