I’m not joking
It really IS cold
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/07/freezing-weather-britain
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/08/weather-cold-ice-fog
It was supposed to warm up today but it didn’t try very hard. And freezing fog is very weird stuff: you expect it to ping off your windscreen but it doesn’t, but walking through it is a bit like being patted by a very cold pincushion. Hellhounds and I went out late again this morning* but the fog was still as dense as tar or osmium: like you expect it to ping off your windscreen you also expect resistance when you open the car door and you kind of hesitate before you plunge in and the world–including your car–disappears into swirly grey and shadows. There could be any number of swirly grey things with teeth in this morning’s fog, but we seem to have missed them. Maybe the hellhounds scared them off.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/05/weather-transport-cold-snow
I’m so glad I work at home.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2009/jan/05/weather?picture=341416524
Although, speaking of perspective, while these photos are very pretty, I should get out some of my Maine winter photos. However the drive home from handbells this evening was nearly as interesting as drives back from Deer Isle occasionally were twenty years ago: you don’t also need three feet of snow for the crucial interesting effect of a thin top layer having briefly melted for two hours in the afternoon and frozen hard at sunset.
I will leave you with a photo or two of a geranium dressed for winter action. All it needs is teeny skiis. My little road is already a perfectly adequate slippery slope. 
This first one was weeks ago when I thought we were just going to have a night or two of standard mild frost. The second one is the epic version. 
Very convenient that one of my last-minute Christmas orders came in Giganti-Box and, since the order itself was very small, full of air bags. I’ve got really skilled in wrapping the poor bloody geranium, and the rose that’s in the same planter, which rose, as it happens, is one of my sillier choices and should have died in its first year but in its fourth year has been doing rather well, in air bags, plopping the cardboard box over (held up by a well-placed bamboo stake or two) and stuffing the rest of the airbags in the gaps and whisking the flaps shut before they all fall out again. Come spring this geranium and its companion rose may be the only things left alive in my garden. . . . Sigh. . . .
* * *
*Not because we were waiting around for it to warm up, but because Modern Life is driving me round the twist.^ There’s a website crucial to my happiness that hates me. I tried to order from it last weekend and it wasn’t having any. Payment failed! it kept chirping at me. [Insert bad language here] I tried again about 24 hours later but it saw me coming. Payment failed! Hee hee hee hee! At which point I hit ‘contact us’ and wrote an email . . . and then I took all the bad language out and sent it. And got a very nice polite worried answer from a real human being. Meanwhile I’d ordered my grow light successfully^^ so I knew the card was working.
This morning the poor Real Human Being rang me and we struggled to put the order through by roundabout ways. Nope. I tell you the web site and all its minions hate me. Finally the Real Human Being said, I don’t think there’s any point in going on with this now, your bank has probably flagged the transaction as bogus. I went outdoors to undress the geranium and cool off . . . and cue the phone to ring the minute I’m out of earshot, leaving me a message to ring the fraud department of my credit card’s bank Do Not Delete This Is A Genuine Call. Then I played push-button phone tag for a while and eventually got onto another Real Human Being^^^ who said, Hi! We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but your card is one of several hundred we fear has been compromised and we’ve cancelled the lot!
Which still doesn’t explain why the original web site hates me.
^ I hope there’s no ice on the curve. It’s a bad curve.
^^ which arrived today. I’ve put the boxes in the sitting-room to inspire the jungle to hold on for a few more lightless days till Atlas can come hang it. Atlas should get it up and working just about when the weather breaks and we have Death Valley in July in Hampshire in February. http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/city_guides/results.shtml?tt=TT001490
Which reminds me:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/08/summer-aid
Oh joy. Be ahead of the rush, and buy your air con now. Are there green air conditioners yet? There must be. Oh, of course there are. I know I’ve read about a new line coming out now that runs on composted Wall Street traders. I believe the brand name is The Hedge Fund.
^^^ We-ell . . . do real human beings ever work for credit card companies?
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