A Simple Life of Luxury

The weather is warming up, the clocks have gone forward so it is time to start work in the garden again.
Morgan and I had a productive day yesterday.

• The lawns (if you can call them that) have been mowed. They’ve taken a bit of abuse over the winter from being waterlogged and from a pesky little mole and they aren’t looking great, but I’m sure they’ll recover.
• The willow and white poplar were cut right back as these will hopefully become a hedge along the edge of the garden.
• All the beds were edged, forked over and enriched with compost from our compost bins and the plants were all cut back and tidied up.
• The compost bins were forked through and sorted out.

Most things seem to have survived the winter, although the cold snap we had last week was quite a shock to the system to the already shooting Clematis and Gunnera. Now that things are tidy it is time to start getting a little creative out there. The first creative job will be to create a border around the deck out the front and fill it with bedding plants. As usual there are great plans for the garden, but no doubt it will be time-consuming enough just keeping on top of the grass!

Hopefully now that it has had some attention it will start to come to life.

Following on from my post last week about cold weather windsurfing, here’s another ‘cool’ video clip of someone windsurfing in Antarctica!

I tried to take some photos of the Lunar Eclipse on Saturday evening, but didn’t have a tripod which made things a little difficult.

It was also one of those occasions where an old fashioned film camera would probably have been better. It was OK as the moon was beginning to be eclipsed, but once fully eclipsed there simply wasn’t enough light being given off. The trouble was caused by the fact that my digital camera has an LCD display on the back of it and also a small LCD within the viewfinder. This means that the image you look at when composing a shot is generated by computer rather then simply being what you can see through the lens. The computer isn’t sensitive enough to pick up the faint light given off by an eclipsed moon so I was unable to take any shots of it whilst eclipsed. So, it looks as though I shall have to wait for the next one now. Not to worry, itwas quite interesting to watch anyway.

This is a post for Anna’s mum and all you phenologists out there. We may be heading for some snow and a bit of a cold snap, but our Marsh Marigold (Caltha palustris) has just started flowering. Apparently it is meant to flower between March and June, so it must be a little confused!

Our weather station has now been up and running for over a year so I can start comparing stats. I’ve been looking today at the January’s weather stats from 2006 vs 2007…. Now obviously 2 data points can’t in anyway form a trend and with my geological background I’m always moaning at ‘weather experts’ for looking at things over too short a timescale, but this January was certainly a lot warmer, wetter and windier than last:

Averages\Extremes for the month of January to 31 2007

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Average temperature 8.3 °C
Average humidity 83 %
Average dewpoint 5.5 °C
Average barometer 1015 mb
Average windspeed 14 kts
Average gustspeed 18 kts
Average direction 252 ° (WSW)
Rainfall for month 85.6 mm
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Maximum rain per minute 0.6 mm on day 17 at time 03:26
Maximum temperature 12.3 °C on day 18 at time 07:10
Minimum temperature -0.4 °C on day 25 at time 19:52
Maximum humidity 96 % on day 19 at time 21:29
Minimum humidity 51 % on day 23 at time 14:42
Maximum pressure 1035.2 mb on day 27 at time 22:40
Minimum pressure 979.8 mb on day 18 at time 06:41
Maximum windspeed 51.0 kts from 259° on day 18 at time 07:09
Maximum gust speed 57.0 kts from 273° on day 18 at time 12:15
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Averages\Extremes for the month of January to 31 2006

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Average temperature 5.4 °C
Average humidity 85 %
Average dewpoint 3.1 °C
Average barometer 1022 mb
Average windspeed 8 kts
Average gustspeed 11 kts
Average direction 136 ° ( SE)
Rainfall for month 35.2 mm
———————————————————–
Maximum rain per minute 0.8 mm on day 14 at time 00:40
Maximum temperature 11.6 °C on day 13 at time 14:21
Minimum temperature -2.6 °C on day 31 at time 05:37
Maximum humidity 100 % on day 20 at time 20:23
Minimum humidity 56 % on day 28 at time 15:10
Maximum pressure 1035.7 mb on day 22 at time 19:14
Minimum pressure 992.9 mb on day 01 at time 00:14
Maximum windspeed 30.0 kts from 257° on day 20 at time 03:47
Maximum gust speed 36.0 kts from 257° on day 20 at time 03:47
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The days are getting longer and the first signs of Spring are here… We have some daffodil and Bluebell shoots in our front garden… I wonder what sort of a display they will provide this spring?

I treated myself to a day out geocaching yesterday. A good excuse to play with some of my Xmas presents and enjoy the winter sunshine. Before I go any further I should of course thank Anna for looking after Morgan all day long and letting me go out to play.

I started off with a relatively easy cache just above the shores of Tal-y-Llyn. Sam’s Cache was found easily and gave me a chance to try out my new toys. Before setting out I had downloaded information about the nearest 100 geocaches to our house and had uploaded them to my iPod as contacts. So, my new iPod as well as providing me with entertainment on my walk also provided me with the necessary coo-ordinates for the caches I was trying to find, along with the various clues and details needed. It has to be said it isn’t the perfect solution as I still had to enter the coordinates into my GPS receiver and the iPod probably isn’t the most robust tool or taking into the hills. It did however save me printing out the cache notes and as the iPod is new it was fun to play with it.

I then headed off to an Earth Cache (These are virtual caches with a geological point of interest and an educational element too.) I was the first to find this one (Sliding with Stile)which is always a bonus.

From here I decided to head off towards another cache higher up the hills in a ‘forgotten valley’ near to the ‘Devils Stone‘ which dates from the 16th Century. It was a lovely walk through a very peaceful valley, made even better by the fact that I knew Cadair Idris just to the east was teaming with walkers. In this valley I saw no one at all. I found the cache without any difficulty and found the Devils Stone .

Folk lore has it that before the days of the Reformation, local parishioners used to gather in the Rhiwogof Valley below Cadair Idris on the Sabbath to dance and play games.
One Sunday, the Devil appeared perched on a rock in the form of an ass, rearing up on its hind legs he let out a frightening howl that shook the surrounding mountains, everyone fled, no one had the courage to visit the spot for months afterwards.
However in time, two local shepherds one from Pencoed and the other from Rhiwogof, went to examine the rock and found the Devil’s hoof print embedded in it.

I then headed back down the hill to the car before driving to Abergynolwyn and then off up the valley to find two ore caches: Tal-y-Llyn adventure was found easily, but Quarryman and the Monkey Puzzle Tree took me a little longer to find the actual container. I was in the right area but there were so many potential hiding places that it took me ages to find the cache.

All in all a lovely day making the most of the local countryside. My new rucksack was comfortable, my iPod worked well, my new boots were OK but did give me some small blisters and my FM transmitter for my iPod worked well too. The engine management light on my new car came on again though so I still need to get that sorted.

It was a sad day in our household yesterday due to the death of a pet frog…

For those who don’t know, I used to be a zookeeper at Bristol Zoo and whilst I was there I adopted several exotic pets. These pets included 4 Whites Tree Frogs which I have had ever since. They are kept in a small vivarium and are occasionally fed live crickets. One of them has been looking decidedly skinny for a while now and was found dead in the tank yesterday. A sad day, but as he was about 18 years old I guess he has done pretty well. The other three seem healthy enough and the Fire-bellied toad that I have is still doing OK as well, despite being at least 23 years old.

The view from our lounge

Continuing on from my post yesterday about autumn being back to normal, the winds are continuing to batter us here in Wales. The weather station recorded a gust of 48.8 knots on Sunday (the strongest up until then), but this morning we have beaten that with a gust of 53.6 knots. (Thats 61.7 mph or 99.3 km/hr).

It is still pretty blustery out there, so who knows I may be updating this post with an even stronger gust later.