Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Fed up with the lack of water, we decided to relocate ourselves from my place to Alice's house down by the river where the electrics might be in an uncertain state but at least we wouldn't have to keep melting snow to flush the loo.

Walking through town, we found the main roads still closed but there were quite a lot of people wandering around on foot. Much to our good fortune, Marks and Spenser in town was open, enabling us to stock up. Possibly unsurprisingly, there was no great shortage of stock; rather, the staff were going through, frantically stickering perishable items that were clearly about to hit there sell-by dates. As a result, we picked up a lot of stuff — including a big pile of sandwiches for lunch for the next few days and a number of meal-deals — for almost nothing.

Arriving at the riverside, we found the house in a good state, with relatively little disruption from the re-wiring work. The damage to the plaster seems to have been limited to a series of discrete holes — mostly around lightswitches and plugs — with most things working as expected. C&J joined us, both of them having been in to work as normal, and we got the fire going and had a really lovely evening enjoying the intermittantly falling snow...

Waking up to a light dusting of snow this morning, I immediately took a photo of it and dashed in to the bedroom to show it to A, who'd been lamenting Exeter's lack of snow for quite some time. We were both excited by it, but my reaction was somewhat dampened when I noticed that, once again, our water pressure was low, suggesting that the building inlet had frozen. We had a slightly leisurely breakfast watching the snow coming down in swirls and I went in to the office where I discovered only DJM was in and was about to leave before conditions became too severe.

During the morning, there were a series of announcements about the impending snowpocalypse and the closing times for the various eateries at work were updated. I had a meeting with a colleague, rescheduled from the day before, and ate lunch early before returning to my desk. At around 1320Z, we were all asked to leave and told not to come in tomorrow. I took a few photos, caught the last bus into town, and took a few more pictures of Exeter in the snow. By this point, the blizzard had started in earnest and id din't really let up until the end of the day.

Arriving home, I was greeted by a curiously lovely smell in the hallway. It was stronger in the flat and, when I went through into the kitchen, I realised what it was: A had baked a lemon drizzle cake! Sadly we were still without water — A had had a number of conversations with the neighbour from the basement — but we had some big bottles of water from Tuesday and we put on some big saucepans of snow to flush the loo.

After tea and cake, we went for a walk in Belmont Park, where the entire community had turned out to enjoy the snow. We were particularly impressed by an enterprising group of students who were attempting to sledge using a large ABS suitcase — we felt they'd've been more successful had they opened it up and used the two halves together rather than leaving it closed. We walked back the long way round and went round by the dry ski slope — very much covered in snow — and put down footsteps in the pristine snow.

Waking up and not hearing the tell-tale sounds of rain from outside, I thought we might have managed to beat the forecast. But when I looked out of and saw the teeming water, I realised my mistake: I'd pulled my bedroom window all the way closed the day before because someone was working outside with their radio on fortissimo and I wanted to shut out the noise.

Slightly disappointed, I pulled on my waterproof and headed out to meet up with the others for the usual Sunday dog walking. We'd planned to meet at nine, but delayed things by a few minutes to allow C to drop J off at the station in time for the London train. Leaving Tiny Flo at home to recover from her upset tummy — she had to content herself with twanging a spring-loaded doorstop! — we headed out with the rest of the canine contingent in search of muddy puddles and fields, which, thanks to the rain were enough for them and they weren't tempted to go swimming in the canal.

After a couple of hours, we ended up where we'd started and split up to go our separate ways: the newlyweds to go to the Double Locks to pick up the things they'd put in storage after their reception on Saturday; C to do some shopping; A to visit a friend; and me to go home, have a shower, and to put all my damp clothes in the laundry basket.

I spent the rest of the day pottering around inside and doing a post of post-production work on some recent photos. I thought about going climbing, but admitted to myself that I couldn't face the idea of going out again — it wasn't so much the rain as the thought of having to put my soggy shoes back on for the walk home from the climbing centre that really discouraged me.

By evening, the rain had stopped and walked down to the Puerto for the quiz. Much to my delight, I discovered that (a) Yorkshire Nick was back as quizmaster; (b) Dasher had come along to make up the numbers; and (c), even more unexpectedly, J was there too — it transpired that her trip to London had gone wrong after her rail replacement bus got caught up in a road accident — providing us with a vast, additional pool of knowledge.

Sadly, we only managed second place this week — some of the rounds were quite tricky — but that's fine: the others well deserved their win and, if nothing else, we were the only ones with a adorable springer on their team...

Out for dinner with friends, where I had the opportunity to meet their new springer puppy for the first time, I noticed the river levels were even higher than when I'd been running this morning. Fortunately I'd carefully picked a route that avoided any of the flooded bits of pavement and made it their unscathed.

After an extremely nice evening, filled with plenty of cooing over the new arrive and her oh-so-cute ways, I got ready to leave. My hosts offered me a lift, but I declined. I then stepped outside, we all realised how heavily it was raining, and I reconsidered the lift. Although it was dark and hard to tell for sure, it looked as though the river was up again and the pavements on the eastern bank were well and truly submerged.

Very, very hot solo run this evening. Despite leaving it as late as possible, the mecury was still in the mid-twenties and it was hard going. When I got home my top was so saturated it took me several minutes to wrestle it over my shoulders and there was a moment when I thought I might end up trapped in a swathe of sweaty spandex.

I was lucky and managed to get to work in a brief gap between thunderstorms, but others weren't so lucky and arrived looking distinctly bedraggled. Then, in the middle of a conversation about a thorny problem that had kept someone up until three this morning, there was the huge flash of nearby lightning strike followed by an abrupt loss of power to the building. Not exactly the most auspicious start to the day. But the UPS did its job and the power feeds switched to an alternate substation and things gradually started coming back on. Just as well: I'm not sure either of us was up to the chore of a cold restart...

Despite a couple of weeks of terrible storms, today's feels like the worst of the lot: the track seems to be passing directly over us, where as others have tracked further to north. The rain, intermittent until mid-afternoon but now semi-permanent, has been driving and everything seems to be taking a battering from the strong and incredibly gusty winds — I've been out a couple of times to try and move the dustbins to a more sheltered spot, not that it seems to have helped much!

Having experienced yesterday's terrible weather and seen the forecast, which promised worse for today, I wasn't looking forward to my morning run. But in the end it wasn't too bad: I managed to avoid the worst of the rain and I don't think it was quite as windy as yesterday.

The only real problem was the little swing bridge where the river and the canal join up. Somehow it had managed to drop below freezing, turning the already wet deck into something resembling a slick ice rink. Fortunately a cyclist, who I now suspect must have found out the hard way, warned me what I was in for and I slowed down in preparation. But not by enough, it transpired: I slid a good part of the way across before hugging on to the rail and saying something like, "Wow. Ok. You were right: it is slippery!"

The forecast for tomorrow looks even worse than today's — heavy rain and winds gusting 50 mph — but at least it doesn't look icy...

Didn't see too much storm damage on my run this morning: just higher than normal river levels, lots of leaves and small branches all over the place, and one of our bins blown over. In fact the greatest impact I noticed was when I got epically splashed by a car driving too fast through a huge puddle somewhere along Magdalene Road. Delightful.

ETA: It's good to see the model and the supercomputers credited with much of the success of the prediction!

Via insideHPC, a Washington Post piece on the US National Weather Service's plans to increase their supercomputing capacity. But what I really found interesting was a link to a 2012 blog posting by Cliff Mass criticising the performance of NWS' model when comparied with ECMWF and the Met Office.

Mass' comments remind me of a discussion I had with someone from another met service — not the NWS &mdahs; who was talking earnestly & excitedly about their forthcoming procurement and what a huge difference it was going to make to their supercomputing capacity. The scientist I was with breezily dismissed this, saying "You don't need more computer capacity. It's not going to help because all your models are at least 20 years out of date..." It may have been true, but it left the other completely crushed.