That was something of an odd week

So.  We had snow on Monday, which turned to rain, which washed the snow away.  There was a Japanese class on Tuesday - but missing the one when I had flu was a definite reminder that you need to attend ALL the classes if you are going to get anywhere.  They had done the Dictionary Form of Japanese verbs in that class and I had absolutely no idea what was going on :-S  I suppose I should be able to work it out - I have borrowed some grammar books from our little Japanese collection at work :-)

Wednesday dawned grey and misty and damp.  The damp turned to rain. The rain turned to snow. The snow turned to heavy snow.  Julia and I got to Sheffield station in the evening to find a general level of chaos. The electric wires were down beyond Luton thus meaning that any electric trains had stopped running.  But so too had the diesel trains. Even they can't run when the lines are all cluttered up with electrical wiring!  This meant that train services to London were stopping at Bedford, if they were running at all. And many other services were severely disrupted.  Fortunately, Julia and I managed to get to Chesterfield without too much trouble and without much of a delay. The Builder, however, was stuck in traffic not all that far from our place. It took him an hour to get to the station (usually takes about ten minutes). It took us 45 minutes to get back home from the station.  Still.  Could have been worse.  One of my colleagues who lives up beyond Fulwood took nearly three hours to get home because the buses simply stopped running and he had to walk through the snow.

And then the snow once again turned back to rain and the roads were washed clear.

Even the desk rotas showed a distinctly anarchist tendency on Friday. One person had misread their shifts so wasn't about for the morning - and complete chaos ensued.  We did get it all sorted out in the end but it was all rather chaotic while the day was progressing.  Fortunately there were a few bodies around without anything particularly pressing to do so we could all be a bit flexible.  But the rotas aren't usually that difficult to tame, even when people don't turn up!

The weekend (rather disingenuously, I fear) was redolent with the promise of spring. Saturday and Sunday mornings dawned foggy, it is true - but then the fog cleared to reveal bright blue skies, a strange yellow orb in the sky and even fairly warm temperatures for the time of year.  I hung washing out on the line on both days and on both days it pretty nearly dried. We went for a wander around the Wetlands on Sunday morning, and dropped by for our first inspection of the allotment for the year. But winter is about to fight back. They are forecasting a significant drop in temperature later in the week - and even the possibility of yet more snow :-S

In the meantime, poor Freyja did not have a particularly delightful Thursday evening.  Some charming person decided that s/he had a more urgent need to own Freyja's backpack than Freyja did and ambled out of the pub where Freyja and the backpack were spending the evening with the backpack in tow. They probably didn't gain as much as they might have hoped from this action.  Most fortunately, Freyja's wallet was not in the backpack, so no thiefly joy there. Her keys and her passport (no, I don't know why you need a passport to go to the pub) and her student card and her staff card and her brand new notepad for taking lecture notes were all in it - but won't have been of much value to a thief.  And so too was her laptop, which was much too elderly to be of any real use to a thief, and which she had been considering saving up to replace - but she hadn't intended to give it up entirely, nor quite so abruptly. Fortunately, it is password protected so your average opportunistic thief wouldn't be able to get into her various accounts and we have, in any case, changed as many passwords as we could think of. But she was definitely not happy about its loss. I wouldn't be happy if my laptop randomly wandered off either. (Mine wasn't password protected - it has been since Friday morning!!!)

On a happier note, though - she and Simon have bought tickets for their very own Grand World Tour (so she can't afford to replace the laptop!!!). They leave London on December 7th, heading to Melbourne via a few days in both Bali and Perth. I would worry that their itinerary seems to have them arrive in Auckland on January 2nd with no obvious means of escape - but Freyja tells me that the second part of the itinerary isn't finalised yet and she isn't anticipating being held captive in New Zealand indefinitely.

New Highland cattle have arrived in the wetlands

Muddy bridge over what is usually a tiny stream

This is generally a tiny trickle that you hardly notice

and there is, allegedly, a footpath from where I am, through the field, to that gate over there!!