Tag: rain

Extremes of Time and Weather TWTW # 131

On By tontowilliamsIn books, Dog, Garden / Allotment, Quick Links, The Week That Was, Wilson's Story, work

It feels like it’s been a long week, but I also feel like I’ve been particularly time poor this week, with the days themselves passing very quickly. The weather has flipped during the week, from hot and scorching at the start to wet and cooler by the time I am writing this on Sunday.

There isn’t an update that I can provide on Wilson, other than to say lots of things have been ruled out, but there is still one set of results outstanding. He’s back with the vet on Tuesday to have some stitches from a biopsy site removed. Hopefully by then that outstanding test will be back. It’s difficult to see him so unwell it makes my heart hurt, but he’s pretty stoic and seems to be very much himself beyond the visible symptoms.

I’ve had a few new sign-ups this week, some off of the back of a book review (see below) that I published, and also a few (I think) from being involved in AudioMo.

If you’re new here and wondering what an earth you’ve signed up to, welcome. This is my website / blog, by training I am a biologist and by profession I generally make most of my income from being an independent environmental consultant. Outside of that I have a fairly wide interest in all sorts of things. I normally publish a post like this on the weekend at the end of the week (TWTW = The Week That Was), and talk about what I’ve been doing in the previous week, links to things I’ve found and anything else that I think might be interesting. Other occasional posts will appear at other times e.g. book reviews.

Thanks for signing up, but if after reading my ramblings you’re regretting your decision feel free to unsubscribe, there is a link to do so in each post if you subscribe by email. Obviously I hope you’ll stick around.

I also post on Instagram and Twitter where I am also @tontowilliams

Work. I had a virtual meeting with a client on an ongoing project that has been significantly disrupted by covid. It doesn’t feel like there is much work there for me in the near future.

Reading. Not that much. I’ve been dipping back into Ernie Pyle’s stories of the second world war in Italy in 1943, and also the war artist Edward Ardizzone’s second world war diaries. By coincidence these are also from the same time, but the similarities and differences between the two men’s experiences are quite marked.

I also published a review for Rob Cowen’s book The Heeding which I’ve been holding at the request of the publisher until the week of publication. It’s such a great book, and I’d recommend it, particularly if you like narrative poetry.

I always carry a notebook. They normally last a few months until they’re full, and then I swap them out for a new one. I write ideas for stories, shopping lists, nature observations, draw sketches and all sorts of other things in them.

It’s taken a bit longer to fill each one during covid times (although I have been writing more in my main journal) but this week it was time to swap the old for the new. In this instance from a Field Notes to a Moleskine. Moleskine went through a patch where their paper quality wasn’t all that great but they seem to have gone back to better paper stock again so I’m trying a newer book from their limited edition Lord of the Rings series.

Allotment. The rain has been great, but it has really promoted week growth, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of weeding. I also harvested the last of the broad beans this weekend, and have now dug over that part of the plot. I’m planning on sowing some more salad crops in the space which I’ll do next weekend if not before.

Links.

Covid: How have allotments helped people during the pandemic?

After walking to work, Beau Miles has now tried paddling to work:

That’s it for this week. Depending on how things work out in the week ahead, I might be travelling to Oxfordshire to celebrate George Orwell’s birthday, and I have that appointment with the vet but otherwise no specific plans.

Whatever your plans, take care and stay safe.

A Blanket Made of Home Spun Wool TWTW # 127

On By tontowilliamsIn books, Dogs, Fork To Fork, Garden / Allotment, Memories, pupdate, Quick Links, The Week That Was, Wildlife/Nature, Wilson's Story, work

Once again the allotment is wet and miserable, but the weather is due to improve later so I’ll be heading down there then. I did pop in to check everything was alright this morning after a day of strong winds yesterday. No damage to report. While I was there I picked these radish, the warm and wet conditions of the last couple of weeks means that they’ve grown well, and these have a very fiery taste, eye-wateringly so!

I’ve spent a little time on the plot during the week this week, it was perhaps a perfect way to spend an afternoon, I was earthing up the potatoes and sowing some extra broad bean seeds. The weather was sunny and the temperature not too hot.

I’ve also been clearing out the potting shed of the over-wintering plants and converting the space to enable us to grow some tomatoes and cucumbers.

I had to take Wilson back to the vet on Monday, and upset stomach has kept us busy but it wasn’t resolving on it’s own. Things seem much improved now though.

It was also Ruby’s 7th birthday. I pulled together a short montage of some of my photo’s of her over the last seven years.

Reading. I’ve been rereading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the umpteenth time this week, I enjoy these stories so much but it’s been a while since I’ve read the whole collection. I’m planning to go on to Memoirs and Return in due course but picked up a Brother Cadfael – The Confession of Brother Haluin to read in the meantime. I always learn something new reading these, often having to resort to looking something up in a dictionary or encyclopedia. For example did you know that a “Brychans” is a blanket made of home spun wool?

I’ve also been reading some of George Orwell’s Diaries, these are interesting particularly as you can see how his experiences recorded in them later translated to some of his books. For example his journey to go hop-picking where he spends some time sleeping “rough” is very similar to what ends up being in Down and Out in Paris & London. I hope as I read more of them there will be some similar parallels.

Links. There’s been a lot of coverage of the Queen’s speech and the government’s announcements about tree planting and peatlands. There’s a good summary here. Personally I think the proposals are a bit weak and don’t go far enough, particularly with regards to stopping the use of peat-based compost, with the government holding yet another consultation on this rather than actually taking action based on the decades of evidence that it already has.

There’s also a good ranking of companies by the Financial Times of those reducing their carbon emissions here.

Twenty firms produce 55% of the worlds plastic waste [LINK].

David Quammen on travelling into the past to cover the pandemic [LINK]. I’ve said it before but you need to read David Quammen’s book Spillover to help understand how we got to where we did with Covid-19.

I’ve been sorting through a lot of boxes from my parents loft this week. In one I found a lot of old books from my childhood. There were a lot of Dandy annuals and also my old i-Spy collectors books. It looks like I had a life membership from around 1977 but there no longer appears to be an i-Spy club going in the same format anymore. Great shame as it these and other similar books that really got me into nature and the outdoors and recording all the things that I saw. Something that I am still doing to this day.

Work. A very quiet week workwise, it’s a real struggle at the moment. I’ve got a booking for an evening allotment talk next week and have been making the final arrangements for that and preparing my slides. It’s a Zoom talk and the last one I have in my diary for several months. In fact the next one is supposed to be an in person talk – booked before the pandemic – but whether that will go ahead in that format remains to be seen.

The week ahead is looking fairly busy but with small things of little importance but that are necessary and will take up time. I seem to have weeks like that now and again when I try and get through a lot of tasks that I’ve been putting off or unable to do. It gets them done but makes for a pretty boring week overall. I’ll have to see if I can find a way to put a little bit more life into it!

Whatever you’re going to be getting up to, Stay Safe and Take Care.

Raindrops and Earworms TWTW # 125

On By tontowilliamsIn books, Dogs, Garden / Allotment, podcasts, The Week That Was, tv, walking, work

Hello. I’m just back from the allotment. It’s too wet today to do very much – it’s always a fine line on my plot to be able to work the ground, particularly if the ground gets wet, as they the clay in the soil makes it a quagmire pretty quickly. In the summer if hot and sunny – it will become a concrete-like dustbowl.

We took a quick detour on our morning walk to remove some of the coverings that have been on the seedlings so that they can get the benefit of the rain (and to save me having to hand water). The temperatures are up high enough that I don’t have to worry about frost for the next few days (and hopefully we’re done with it completely now). There is nothing like good rain water to make plants grow.

As you can see I think Ruby wasn’t quite so impressed at the stop. We’re now tucked-up warm at home and I’m writing this while she is gently snoring under a blanket.

Mostly this week when I’ve not been at my desk working, I’ve been out with at least one of the dogs. We don’t often all walk together now, the older one prefers to stay at home for us to come back. I know he sits and waits in the hall for us to return, and I feel sad about that but medically it’s better for him that he’s there and he seems happy to play the role of guardian of the front step until we get back.

This week was supposed to have been a four day week, but I opted to work on Bank Holiday Monday, to make sure that I made enough progress with a project that I could hand it off to those I was collaborating with before I had other things that I needed to do. I made a mental promise to myself that I would have my Bank Holiday another day. So I’m writing it down here too, so that there’s some accountability to it.

Amongst other podcasts I’ve been listening to the latest edition of @documentally’s newsletter pod this week. It’s a part of his newsletter that is available to paying subscribers, of which I am one. He has been interviewing his paid subscribers, who come from all walks of life but all seem to have interesting stories to tell. I’ve volunteered to be interviewed so at some point he will get to me, which the more I hear of the other editions the more I wonder what on earth we’ll talk about.

You can subscribe to his newsletter for free and you’ll get something good in your email inbox about once a fortnight but paid subscribers (it’s less than the cost of a good takeaway coffee a month) get a weekly missive and the bonus audio and other occasional extras.

I’ve also taken advantage of an offer for 3 months free of Apple Music. As a rule I don’t listen to a lot of music and I’m not sure the full price (£9.99/month) will tempt me at the end of the freebie period, but I thought I’d give it a try. So far it hasn’t swayed me either way particularly. When left to use its AI it seems to predictably serve up things that are already in my iTunes library and not offer me much that’s new or I’ve not heard before. I’m trying to help it a bit by liking or not the tracks it serves up but it doesn’t seem to be having much impact yet.

Watching. After deciding not to watch the last season of Line of Duty in our household, one of us weakened and we ended up watching the whole series over 4 evenings this week – for the record I was present during this time and kinda watching over the top of my book. If you haven’t watched it yet and are going to then I won’t spoil it for you.

Work. As mentioned above I’ve been working on a proposal over several days this week, we now wait and see what happens next. I’m relatively relaxed about it either way as it’s a completely remote piece of work and part-time, so would still mean that I’d have space for other clients or non-work stuff.

Reading. I finished reading The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster this week. When I went to add it to my GoodReads profile where I log all my reads I noticed that it’s the first book that I’ve completed for a couple of weeks. Not because I’ve not been reading, although I think it’s fair to say I’ve not been reading as much but because I’ve been dipping in and out of all sorts of things, ranging from the history of the D-Day Normandy landings in 1944 to Ernie Pyle’s accounts of the war in Sicily in 1943 to essays by George Orwell and tales of Ernest Hemingway. A mixed bag indeed.

Signal take out honest ads showing how Facebook profiles it’s users and gets it’s ads banned. [LINK] [LINK]

Hydrogen fuel may not be the best way to replace fossil fuels. [LINK]

Farmer accidentally makes Belgium a bigger country [LINK]

UK Government plans to make 50% funding cut to arts subjects [LINK]

Well that’s all I have for this week. The week ahead is looking relatively quiet apart from having to take Wilson to the vet for a check-up midweek. Whatever you are up to, take care and stay safe.

Red Sky Updated

On By tontowilliamsIn Garden / Allotment1 Comment

So I posted a little early yesterday perhaps. When I went into the kitchen for a cup of tea yesterday evening, I looked out to the garden to see it was raining, and had been for a little while.

I’m pleased. Pleased that the proverb is still good, but more importantly that this is the first rain that we’ve had for over a month. It rained all evening and continued over night, and was still going this morning.

I popped into the allotment this morning to uncover some of the seeds I sowed at the weekend, so that they’d get a good drop of rain. I truly believe that rainfall is the best thing for plants rather than direct watering from a hosepipe. I hope it continues for little while, we need a good drop.

Fruits of Summer

On By tontowilliamsIn Garden / Allotment4 Comments

2016-06-25 08.28.02

It’s that time of the year when the soft fruit is ripening, and there’s an almost daily supply of fresh loganberries (a cross between a raspberry & a blackberry) and gooseberries, it’s one of my favourite times on the allotment. Last night I made loganberry ice cream, and tonight I’ll be making gooseberry ice cream. Tomorrow, there will probably be more to make something else with.

This week has been extremely unpredictable weather-wise. It’s been hot and sunny one moment, and then we’ve had yellow weather warnings for rain. The weather warnings were lifted on Friday morning, and then this happened:

I suppose given the inaccurate science of weather forecasting I shouldn’t be surprised, but six inches deep water sloshing around the back door, and across our garden in less than a minute was pretty spectacular and frightening, but at least I won’t have to water this evening!

Allotment Update 6th February 2016

On By tontowilliamsIn Fork To Fork, Garden / Allotment, Self-sufficient

I think this weekend was the first reasonable block of time that I’ve been able to spend on my allotment this year. We’ve had weeks of consistent rain, which has left the soil too damp to work without the fear of compacting it, so there has been a limit to the jobs that I’ve been able to get done. The mild temperatures however have meant that the weeds have continued to grow, and on some of the areas that I had already dug, they have been starting to show through. Spending some time weeding ahead of the forthcoming sowing of seeds was therefore important. If the weather holds mild, and dries up a bit more, I should be able to start sowing a few crops under cover in the near future – I hope!

Allotment Update

On By tontowilliamsIn Fork To Fork, Garden / Allotment

The last couple of weeks have been pretty wet, so it’s been difficult to get much done on the plot. Fortunately I feel like I’m ahead of where I want to be and so when I went to the plot this last weekend I was able to concentrate on some of the smaller tasks like weeding. With the ground being so wet it was easy to get the weeds out, although if I’d been trying to dig I wouldn’t have gotten very far as the ground was far too wet for that.

Progress is always slower during the winter months, but there is still plenty to do. I have compost bins to sort out, and many of the edges of the beds aren’t as well defined as I would like so it’s difficult to know where the beds and paths, start / finish. Jobs for another weekend when it’s not actually raining.

I also dug the celeriac, which was a disappointment. I covered this in the video below, although we actually only ended up with two usable roots, as one of the three you’ll see in the video turned out to be rotten inside when I cut it open. I doubt that I’ll be growing this next year.