May 17, 2014
Hong Kong weather warning symbols
In honour of the blazing days we have been having here weather-wise: here are some fun weather views I’ve been appreciating.
First “the brief description of warning symbols” from the Hong Kong observatory can be seen here
My favourite warning symbol is frost, but also enjoyed the multi-coloured rain warnings.
I was looking at various weather symbols and charts online and noticed one instance, where the warning for fog was simply FOG in large black letters.
Here is Barbara Edwards, the BBC’s first woman weather forecaster, clutching some weather symbols while doing a forecast for the BBC in 1974 and here she describes the experience in an interview. I love how people kept bothering her on her holidays! And that description of the cardboard and scribble job that preceded the rubber symbols arriving on the scene.
February 26, 2012
Turbulent birds
The dry-sounding November windstorm blew into an epic wind event all day long. Vigorous and refreshing. It’s still gusting out there now, but the dial has been turned down on the worst of it.
Today at the Farmer’s Market the poor, tent-less vendors were grabbing and clutching their goods like you would a tumbling child. I bought some very tasty arugula and have found a source of local BC salmon, which I’d previously been hunting for. Very delicious supper. We are so lucky in these parts with the access to local and so much variety of fruits, veggies and great fish.
The birds were dipping and being sidelined by the wind. I was watching them trying to understand how they compensate because they still seem to level out. But they certainly experienced turbulence today the poor blighters. Would we were so savvy as the birds when turbulent circumstances strike!
May 31, 2011
In the process of ousting 32 slugs from my vegetable haven, it reminded me of a writer friend who recently began drawing intensely and described these epic 12 hr marathons drawing an egg. I scanned the soil today so intently, cm par cm for any sight of any sized or version of the blighters. The recent Peat Moss disaster helped matters enormously, it’s so much easier to see anything in peat moss compared to compost or clay.
And much did I see. I couldn’t believe the tribes of creatures who inhabit my little box there. Esp. impressive are the small fellas who can curl up in an instant ball. They look like wood lice but have to be something more complicated than wood lice. Weevils?
It was a very satisfying excavation, defending my stems and emerging beans and I bagged 32 of them away to a salty end. The guinea pigs are benefiting from the Community Garden as they get to scoff down much of last year’s carrots that have been left over winter by my fellow gardeners and now lie hurled into the compost patch smothered in seeded yellow kale. Into my bucket they go and Alfie-Cyril and his brother plough through them.
Today again the Mason Bees had a chat with me. At first nothing, but then as I stared at the soil they began warming up and then moved into quite curving soliloquies. My ears tune into them as I hunt the soil for the unwanted. It is quite gorgeous their chatter and travels quite an auditory distance once you tune it in. I wonder how they sound during the rain.
August 27, 2010
A weather event overnight ! It began with some stormy sounds while I was inside a kitchen working hard and singing loudly.
By this morning the worst headache (is that a myth that a close sky causes headaches?) woke me and outside mid November style visuals.
By night these days we are watering the garden in the pitch dark. Still you can make out the red of late ripened tomatoes and they taste great in the dark.
The seasonal shift is upon us and it’s rather thrilling to notice and record it.
I’m warming up for winter. Tropical storm Earl is also rolling in the wider atmosphere, and Hurricane Danielle fox trotting her way too.
June 7, 2010
I am thinking of renaming my community garden plot The Chipper. This is my 3rd or 4th year in this plot and I am still removing rubble constantly from it. It’s a heart breaker!
The slugs have mown the two budding leaves off my cucumber plant in it’s less than 12 hour lifespan. Meanwhile the Manhattan high potato plant right beside it that could afford a bit of a trim they turned their sniffer up at. I went around pressing the earth round my poor beleagured beans today, hoping some kind of pressure point tactic might have a chat to the old roots down there to charge skyward before the slugs are reborn.
I put two wee containers of beer in to drown the blighters, but my slugs are a very intellectual variety who may also be yeast proof. They are destroying my dreams of having one good year in this plot. Picture the scene all around me are thriving garden plots, year after year.
But in the only bit of uplifting news the alpine strawberry plant that is the very essence of a miracle, because it has thrived in this concrete Chipper, had strawberries on it today. Edible ones. Yum. So the rain fell, I pressed the earth pointlessly, pleaded with the non appearing lettuces, grieved the gone cucumber and snaffled the berries, decided the rain was insufficient, lugged galloons of water across the road, left, not long after the rain absolutely lashed it down.
I am looking forward to greeting my ma’s vegetable tunnel in rural Ireland. I have these illusions I am going to be helpful in it. It’s a great thing delusion …
**
In a non gardening astonishing achievement today I managed to crash the car into a static dumpster. (Lest readers may think it was chasing me) and it is showing dent and abrasion. The combination of going backwards when there’s things beside me is not a sequence to be repeated. It’s over for me and car parks. It’s over for me and dumpsters too. But I’ve good potential for driving that buggy thing that bounces on Mars.
The only good thing was as soon as I crashed into the dumpster three cars in the area took off rapidly and i had a nice bit of space to carry on….
May 31, 2010
Today another request! This time Eros! From a male friend could I read a paragraph of a love letter … which was a touching request. He and I don’t agree on much because he is full of youthful idealism, in contrast to my Beckettian acceptance of the awfulness of everything amen, so we often spar, however on this we agreed. The paragraphs were beautiful. Paced. Thought out. Painstakingly so. It was so moving. It was wonderful to see caution thrown to the wind over the more typical strategic cloaked murmurs.
I was rather lifted and moved by the romance of it all. “You’re such a sensualist”, he said critically, but I misheard it as “You’re such an essentialist.”
I like this accidental term essentialist.
***
On the ferry at the weekend it was rough and windy from Cortes to Quadra. I’d never been on a bumpy BC sailing before but I spent my childhood, being of the Sealink generation, back and forth on the vicious Irish sea. Sometimes it was sooo windy we’d have to pull ourselves along the rails outside on the boat and it wouldn’t be possible to get around the corners at the head of the ship. Your hair would be on end!
Between Nanaimo and Van on Sunday it was again windy, but nothing like as hard on the stomach as that Cortes ferry. I was pleading with my son to come out and run along the deck with me for the craic, but he was nervous at the prospect. Given that sea air and fighting the wind is such a rare enough experience and it’s worth tackling nerves and I offered a few games of pac man in the arcade afterwards. Compared to the old Sealink winds of the 1970’s this was merely a bit of a breeze but we’d a hoot pulling through it.
The smell of boats has changed so much. There was almost a diesel or metal industrial smell that pervaded in the 70’s which would dissolve when everyone inevitably started puking their ring up. I recall if the sailing was rough, people had those bags to their noses and vomit would be the pervasive smell. I must look up and see whether things are just as rough between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire and Fishguard.