Catching up with the Weather

It's been a couple of weeks without a weather update now, so here we go . . . For the 12th-18th January my pictorial system shows a rather wet week; with the week just gone not quite as wet, but with showers most days.

The technological record bears this out, showing a distinctly mild fortnight, without any real frosts.

Return of the Woodpecker

The bird feeder remains popular with the local birdlife, but we hadn't seen the woodpecker in quite a while. He was back though yesterday and now in full adult plumage*:

*Only worked out that our first encounter was with a juvenile by looking more closely at the RSPB website, to find out why the crown of red feathers was now a patch at the back of the head.

One Year On

We've been here a year now - can't quite believe how quickly it's gone - although at the same time it seems like we've been paying the mortgage forever.* Anyway here's a montage of the last year (thanks for the idea Amanda!).

* We really thought the old house would have sold by now - but fingers crossed, new estate agent, new price (lower of course) . . . if only the media would shut up about how bad it all is, maybe we could actually sell!

Hi-Tech Weather

The weather reports will benefit now from a slightly more hi-tech data source, with automatic recording via my new wireless weather station - pictured here in situ on the side of the garage.

The internal reader panel shows the temperature and humidity outside (and inside), pressure, wind speed and direction, and rainfall, among other things.

So for the first few days of January, my lo-tech system gives us:

And the weather station recorded outside temperatures as follows, and a somewhat measly 0.6mm of rain on Friday 4th, with winds that never got above 1 on the Beaufort Scale:

Last week similarly comes out as:

Sunday 11th stands out as the point at which we passed over into a wet and mild period - Sunday night (or rather Monday morning) certainly sounded wet and windy, although apparently we only had about 8mm of rain overnight, and the wind only gusted up to 4 on the Beaufort Scale.

Unfortunately we've no figures to compare with from last year, as we come up to our first year anniversary in the house - will be interesting to make some comparisons in 2010 - particularly as we planning to get some better insulation / double glazing fitted (will be digging out the inside temperature graphs then).

Wood Piles

And piles, and piles. We managed to gather rather a lot of wood over the course of 2008 - we filled the wood shed, and then piled it into the garage out of the rain . . .

. . . then Martin took a chain saw to it . . .

. . . and we stacked it in the garage wherever there was space (including against the broken garage door).

It didn't prove to be the best of drying environments however, so over the last week we've been restacking outside, under the covered porch - it was all going quite nicely until a cat or some such took a short walk along the top of the pile . . .

So this weekend we built ourselves a proper log storage area - it seems much more stable anyway. The separate 'pile' is designated 'dry' (tested at below 30% water content) and is there ready for burning.