Friday 6 July 2012

Floods, Power cuts and a pineapple


Today has been an interesting day; it appears the gods did bring forth the wrath of rain in abundance. Where we live this was in the form of steady heavy rain, never really terrible but relentless all day long.  It meant that we got to try trout tickling in the geography room and some rather exciting cave diving in the school cellars, while form 9FR challenged the upper 6th to a boat race up the main corridor.

The  Ghost Writer said he have a fairly uneventful day in the grey of the grey office, until he had to go home then as he was driving he found himself in the chaos of at least one hundred metres of floods not far from Newtown. But he is good with floods and got through them OK. As he says if people just chill and drive nice and gentle and don’t go at it like a bull in a china shop it is easy, but the masses do like to drive through floods at speed and flood their engines with the spray.



Anyway our only headache has been our electricity tonight it kept tripping out. We still are not sure why, and have tried isolating various things to work out what is happening. At present the solar panel system is off but we just can’t be sure what the problem is. Even dad was unable to conduct his lightning conductor experiments today so we can’t blame him. It is now just too dark to try things because if it all trips now it will be well dark and then we will trip. Still it could be much worse as many people in Britain have had their housed flooded and it is only going to get worse as the floods move down stream.

On a lighter and far sunnier subject my good blogging friend Mr ESB who lives over in the USA is growing a pineapple which he hopes to make the first ROB Z TOBOR Embassy. MrESB is very kind and like my other loyal followers from the USA back on FB, Captain Nessman and Miss Elaine, tolerate my strange quirky eccentric British ways. My British followers see this as normal; sadly due to five years of strange weather most folk over here have lost the plot now and gibber a lot, clutching umbrellas. Throwing rocks at the TV weathermen and eating duck sandwiches in revenge…..  



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9 comments:

  1. wow. The music of that youtube vid makes it sound like Britain is going in to war with the weather! Not much we can do about it, I'm afraid, other than keeps our heads screwed on and laugh at the stuff we really shouldn't be laughing at.
    The other day, I experienced true English weather. It tipped down for about 5 minutes, then went so sunny it was too hot. It then tipped down again. I was camping at the time and was currently sat with my friend about 15 minutes walk from the shelter of my tent.
    So, in true English style, we covered out legs with my umbrella while zipping up our waterproofs and waited for the gap in the clouds - you could actually see it approaching! Once the gap arrived, we sunbathed with the umbrella shading our heads.
    I like how you successfully managed to keep your head up in the nasty conditions.
    I also loved the title. Made me laugh before I even knew what you were on about!
    M. x

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    1. Yes things are very strange, I keep blaming the Gulf stream when I mean the Jet stream but it might be both. It could be an omen that Andy Murray is going to win Wimbledon. The weather can be strange during the tennis at the best of times.

      Only us Brits sunbath in the rain it is why the rest of the world thinks we are mad.

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    2. Your comment reminded me of the only place I know of that experiences bright, sunny skies with simultaneous rain:
      Hawaii. The only place I've been where one must wear sunnies AND an umbrella at the same time. (a photographer's dream) and plenty of magnificent rainbows.

      Wintertime in southern California is as odd, believe it or not (sans the rain)..as it can be 38*f in the a.m., spiking to the 80*'s mid-day. One must be prepared to peel layers of clothing on & off, accordingly. It may not rain for many months, and then in pours for 5 weeks straight.

      Like the song says:
      "..it never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya..it pouuurs, man it pouuurs"..

      The good thing about "English weather" is that it never gets too drastic. I've visited at times (as in over a month) when it drizzled literally each and every day..I've never seen flooding like above. Yeesh!

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  2. Good lighting, less tripping.

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    1. We are working on isolating the problem very slowly but it may involve a man in a van who will look knowingly and say thinks like "OOOOOOooooo that could be expensive the grundle flange deflector is causeing abrasions in the thring puller".

      If he does say this we plan to set the dog on him...

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  3. I wiLL get a picture taken today of your pineapple plant in aLL its trimmed glory and then post it to my blog. Last night as I went downtown to have supper with my son and daughter-in-law and wife, I just happened to see my friend that had received a pineapple plant from me a couple months ago and she said her plant is doing wonderful.

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    1. A man and his pineapples in perfect harmony........

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  4. Last time our lights kept tripping it turned out that our aged cat was weeing on the plug in our top floor bedroom - lucky she didn't frazzle herself!!!

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    1. Ours appears to be down to the central heating I think, even though it is not on at present.

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