Stitching update and another wintry pic

First another wintry picture, this one of the house behind mine with the biggest icicle I've ever seen.

More snow forecast for tonight but it hasn't arrived yet so fingers crossed we escape again and I can get to work fine tomorrow.


And a stitching update to Earth Dragon.... I put this one away some time ago and have just done another 10 hours on it.

My heating wasn't working yesterday

and I can't say I was happy when the engineer came out today to tell me that it wasn't working because you have to turn it off at night because it is too cold for the condensing boiler. Ice has blocked the condensing pipe and this has tripped the auto cut-off on the boiler. As I usually get up early and have my heating on before daylight (the coldest part of the day) to take the edge of the cold in the house before I get up and not on all night (except this past week when it has been so cold here) I guess what he is saying is my boiler works brilliantly as long as it doesn't get cold!!!

The pipe has been cut-off and the remaining ice is being defrosted as we speak so I should get heating soon.

How cold has it been in the UK? It was -18C just a few miles away in Oxfordshire the other night (0F)

This amazing photo from the NASA Terra satellite shows the whole of the UK blanketed in snow. I don't recall weather this bad since my childhood and then we only got 3-4" of snow (I lived near the coast so we always got less snow) and not the 8-10" we have now. Snow in this country usually only lasts 3-4 days before thawing so this is really unusual. It's also snowing again today although only lightly and it's predicted to snow again tomorrow.

Snow videos

This post my take some time to load as it contains videos of my dog Charlie in the snow. There's no sound on these clips.

January 6th - snow and more snow...

Pics taken by my daughter today on her snow day. It is still snowing continuously. I wasn't able to get down my street let alone in to work today but have since heard that the office has been closed and all staff sent home due to deteriorating conditions.

Charlie the Westie loved his outing in the snow though he came back covered in lumps of snow. I have uploaded some videos of him to YouTube and I'll be posting those in the next blog entry.

The first pic is the local football field/recreation ground about 150yards from our house.

Close to my birthday...

The weather always gets really cold and this year was no exception. This is me going to work on Monday 2nd February. Lots of people opted to stay home and part of me doesn't blame them!!!


This last pic is taken from the 7th floor where I'm working, conditions were deteriorating all the time - I find it hard to believe that we almost ran out of road salt in this country!!!