Cloudy, with a chance of Baked Spuds

driving lessons in Wallasey?

Sherlock strikes again!

Today, the weather was clement!  So I girded my loins, and wound my merry way to the allotment. I was digging up the last of the spuds, when I noticed a curious thing.

You can see the skyline of Liverpool from the allotment, and today, the concrete pole that used to be called St John's beacon, but what is now the Radio City Tower looked almost as if it were on fire,  except what appeared to be rising from it was not smoke, but cloud. This column of vapour rose from the horizon right up to the cloud base. I briefly toyed with the notion that someone had nuked Manchester, but that seemed unlikely, and there are no reports of such a thing occurring on the BBC's news website.

So I suspected  a power station. But how could I be sure? I couldn't drive in a straight line from the allotment to St John's beacon, and then beyond. Too many buildings and fences and gardens and rivers in the way. But I could create a line using the power of Google Earth!

I made a placemark at the base of the beacon.



I made another placemark at the allotment.



Then I lined things up and let the "camera" drift eastwards.

We passed over Wallasey and Seacombe, then out over the river to the centre of Liverpool. Then out of the commercial heart of the city and into the suburbs. To Wavertree and Netherton. To Tarbock Green and Farnworth. And there! Directly in front of me was Fiddler's Ferry Power Station. I placemarked that too!

And as you can see, they line up perfectly. Google Earth was also able to tell me that the direct, as the crow flies distance from Allotment to Power Station is 15 miles. Or, if you prefer, 2,415,015 centimetres.



The wonders of modern technology!

Edit:

Wait! There's more! Those 2 million centimetres took me over hill and down dale. And Google Earth knows exactly how up the hills were, and how down the dales were too. And it's given me a topological profile of the terrain between Love Lane Allotments and Fiddlers Ferry Power Station.

My life is enriched! Thank you once again Google Earth!

As you can see, the river Mersey is a flat, sea level bit to the left of the profile. We head down to it, and up away from it, soaring up to a rarified 225 feet above sea level in the Edge Hill area of the city. Watch out for nosebleeds and blackouts before you float gracefully down to a mere 50 feet above the briny towards the end of the trip. 50 feet lower than the starting point, at an average slope of about 1.5%. Nothing that a good stout pair of walking boots couldn't cope with.

Seriously, I've been using this thing for quite a long time now, without necessarily looking deeply at every aspect, so it's still got some surprising tricks up it's sleeve! To access this function, click the ruler button on the top bar (between the planet button and the email button) then simply click on a point and move your mouse pointer to a different point. You'll see a line. When you want to make the other end of a line, click again.

But you're not just limited to individual lines. You can do complete and complex journeys by combining lines to make paths.

As you can see from the picture above, I've just found that we drive 2.5 miles to do our shopping run at Asda. I could use Google Earth to work out  a shorter route. The possibilities are endless!

Forty three and a bit

George Monbiot spent a chilly winter's morning skating on a frozen lake in Wales a couple of years back. He used his column to bemoan the fact that he would probably never be able to do so again. And then the next two years see heavy snowfalls.

Of course, he's really saying that the statistical likelihood is that future winters would be warmer, but I can't help feeling his need to make a point caused him to confuse weather with climate.

Anyway, snow it has. At 4pm the clouds were grey and the ground was dry. At 7pm, the sky was black but everything else was white. We've had about 4 inches of the fluffy stuff in a very short time, and although it's eased off a bit, it looks like it will continue for most of the night.

As with last time, I went to Vale Park and made a snowman. Well, actually a snow Dita Von Teese.

Fog Blog

I was taking Bren to Birkenhead this afternoon, and it was a bit misty. As we got to Seacombe Ferry, we found that a bank of fog was lying over the Mersey, and the newly constructed hi rise towers of the Liverpool skyline were poking up above it. A rare and beautiful site!

We nearly always have a camera with us, but not this time. All we had was the built in camera on Bren's phone. We stopped and she took one quick shot, and couldn't even really compose the picture.



When I'd dropped her off, I collected my camera, and went back to the ferry terminal, but the fog had closed right in, and you couldn't see to the middle of the river, never mind the buildings on the opposite bank.







This has a beauty of it's own of course. Later on, I was teaching someone how to drive in the fog. The sun was going down over the Welsh hills, and there were some beautiful sights to see, but I couldn't take photographs because we were doing 50 miles an hour. I did stop at one point and take one down on New Brighton promenade.



Visibility was down to, what? 100 meters?

It got worse. Much worse. I'm actually lost at the moment. I'm typing this from my laptop with a mobile broadband connection. Somewhere in the distance, a dog is barking. Perhaps if anyone recognises where I am, they can post a message and let me know. Here's a picture.



None of the above photographic missed opportunities come as a surprise. This is nothing new for us.

Once upon a time, a few years ago, we were driving home along the prom, in thick November fog. There was a circus, and it's coloured lights loomed out of the mist. It would have made an amazing picture, but we never went back, and we've always regretted it.

Ice

Google reckoned it was -12°c a short while ago.

I went and took a walk down to the waterfront to see if hell had frozen over yet.

It hadn't, but everything was really still and clear.



The thick fluffy snow of two days ago has by-and-large compacted into solid ice. Treacherous, but actually a bit easier to drive uphill on, because the snow doesn't just get piled up in front of the wheels.

I haven't worked for two days. I'm supposed to have a pupil on test tomorrow, but it is more likely that hell really will freeze over. There was a fantastic satellite image of an almost cloud free Great Britain, almost toally white from Land's End to John O' Groats.




France Gets it too, but the Republic of Ireland stays green. Lucky buggers. I love the snow, but it's a pain in the arse too.

Snow

Snow is like rocking horse poo round here. We're generally a bit warmer than everywhere else because we're next to the sea, and the Clywyd hills catch most of what does arrive.

Not today though. We got more than enough.

Went out in it of course, and slid down a hill.

And we made a snow rabbit.



Good times!