For the past two days the weather has stopped being fun, a novelty to explore and capture on camera. There’s been no sunshine, just a dirty white cloud cover. From my kitchen window I’ve watched hour by hour as the icicles on the roof grew, melted when the temperature got above freezing for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and
View from my kitchen window
Our mailboxes
then refroze. Choir was cancelled. The director was snowed in. The recording of a CD by the wind band I joined was postponed since the recording engineer couldn’t get over the
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Pennines. I’d changed my travel dates for going to Ireland so that I could do the CD. Now I’m thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t meant to be heading to Dublin yesterday. Many airports in the UK are closed. Less than 1/4 of the flights are leaving. 3000 people were stranded in their cars on the M62 overnight. That’s the main motorway between
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Lancashire and Yorkshire over the Pennines. The only road open over the Pennines is the A646 which runs directly past my apartment. Ah, that explains why I was woken by lorries passing in convoy before dawn. The news channels have relegated Mrs May’s Brexit speeches to second place as we see farmers digging sheep from show drifts as tall as houses and doctors walk 10 miles to get to their work.
Around lunchtime I heard the distinctive clip-clop of horses’ hooves and looking through the window I saw the incongruous sight of a Victorian funeral cortege driving along the road. Men in top hats sat atop the carriage pulled by six black horses.
I spent the day quilting, playing with iMovie and writing up my summer journal. I’m up to 19,122 words and I’m only up to July 22nd. It goes to August 25th, the day I flew back to the US. I feel that I really must finish it before I embark on my next trip.
From the chippy downstairs
I ventured outside mid afternoon but although the pavement by the road had been gritted, the passageway from my front door onto the street was literally one sheet of ice. There are two small grocery stores on my block. The first only had the 3 inch tubes of table salt. “No larger sizes?” I asked. “No, all sold out.” Next customer asks for milk. “Sorry, all sold out.” “Aw,” sighs the customer, “The Co-op’s all out of milk – and all veggies too!” It made me feel lucky that I’ve got milk. So I tried the next store. “Have you got any packets of salt?” I asked. “For cooking? Or de-icing?” I left with a bag of de-icing salt that she slit 
open for me so that I could spread it around on the ice in the passageway immediately. Supper was fish, chips and mushy peas from the chip shop beneath my apartment, and now I’m going to sit back and relax to Tones, Drones and Arpeggios. Yep, I’m a total nerd! 
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