Not going to work today

Because we're snowed in! Hooray!

At least it will be hooray up until the point where we start to run out of food. I've had an email from Australia already asking how we're coping with the weather, so I doubt there's anyone anywhere in the world who doesn't know that the UK has been blanketed with snow this week. And since a few flakes fell in London, the whole country has ground to a halt. The newsreaders are all talking gleefully of six million people not going to work, costing our beleaguered economy countless gazillions in lost productivity. Nothing like a crisis to get our media salivating. And they wanted to ban hunting...

snow - not the dachshund's natural element

I made it to work on Monday, but came home early as the warnings were out for the mountain road. I even made it in on Tuesday morning, almost spinning off the road once, but managing to catch it before destroying a local farmer's fence. Come lunchtime yesterday though, the snow was falling thick in Aberystwyth, and since we live a thousand feet higher up than that, the Horse Doctor and I decided it would be wise to get home whilst we were still able.

it's a road, honest

It was a slow journey in horrendous conditions, though nothing like as bad as I've seen in Canada. We made it home just ahead of the snow-plough, and then the snow stopped and the sun came out. Bloody typical, really.

how deep?

There's not been any more snowfall since, but what's there is powdery smooth and blowing around, forming evil-deep drifts. Bad news for four foot Dwarves, as the Two Ronnies used to say. There were long parts of yesterday's stroll where I had to carry the dachshund. All twenty plus kilos of him. Then when we finally made it home, he had to have a warm shower just to remove the clumps of snow attached to his underside. Well it was either that or the bed was going to get very wet.

one of a number of design flaws

Today we didn't even bother trying to go to work, although the weather is perhaps a little better. The slush left behind by the gritters has iced over into a lethal slide, making the hills in and out of here lethal. And then there's those drifts to contend with. Still, work was decent enough to loan me a laptop,* with some stuff on it I can do at home. That way I don't have to count today as leave. The forecast is for more snow tomorrow and Friday. Provided the phone lines don't go down, I'll keep you posted as to how that goes.

* for security reasons I can't put stuff onto a memory stick and work on it on my own PC. But I can take a laptop with all that secure data and more on it home. Go figure.