No snow here in Toronto yet but I thought I would chip in on the subject of heating. I live in a flat in an old four-floor brick building which was constructed in 1930. (40 flats total.) It has a boiler in the basement and steam radiators for distributing heat. However, this morning when I turn the radiators on - nothing. So I'm afraid it may have broken down again. I hope everyone can stay safe and warm! update at 8:30am - the heat came on!!
This recent naming of storms in the UK pisses me off. We exceptionally rarely get anything like the hurricanes, tornadoes, snow etc. other parts of the world suffer from. We get 'weather', appropriate to our mild temperate zone, sometimes leading to flooding and a slack handful of other extremes. It all just seems like another creation to allow media outlets to be hysterical about. 'Arwen' abating, some dustings of snow, a few trees & power lines down, one or two poor sods unlucky enough to get killed by said trees. Things that to much of the planet are just another winter day - covered as if a Twister was coming to obliterate London.
It has snowed well in Tamworth, - 3 last night it was damn cold not like the usual wet early snow. Its a bit wetter now but the mercury has dropped again currently minus 1.5 the wind has dropped too.
Winter has definitely arrived the sun has come out but the scene hasnt changed. Photo taken a few minutes ago Tamworth Staffs. Difficult to get out at the moment due to the ice. Not going anywhere anyway. The shopping can wait until tomorrow.
Hello not much of snow here in Helsinki but the trace we had is not wet, now it is -10 deg C here. Our back garden a ½ hour ago and the River Vantaa, ½ km away, yesterday. Frozen over.
Juha, I remember Helsinki. I went there some 25 years ago and spent a few days on the way to and back from the Opera Festival at Savonlinna. Three great operas in a castle, on an island, in a lake, in the middle of forests. That was in the very short summer. A couple of years earlier I was in Leningrad, as it was then, in January. That must be about the same latitude. The temperature was well below freezing but with no wind and no damp it did not feel very cold. Happy days. Mike
Hello Mike Yep, Savonlinna is a beautiful city and its castle is a decent 15th century defensive castle. In fact, even Helsinki is a bit further north than Leningrad / St. Petersburg, and Savonlinna is about 200 km closer to the North Pole than St. Petersburg. And yes, in January, both Lake Laatokka / Lake Ladoga and at least eastern part of the Gulf of Finland were usually already frozen over, and so the air is drier and the winter winds are less chilling than before the water bodies froze. Now here the effect of the wind on the feeling of cold is quite strong. The sea is not yet frozen over, so even the prevailing southwest winds are rather chilling and in winter the northern winds are always biting cold. All the best Juha
After all white Christmas though barely. Well, more snow has been promised for the next night. This week was very cold up to very late Wednesday evening but almost no snowing. Now -2 deg. C but icy wind.
I was in Leningrad in November of, I think, 1978, as part of a school trip that also included Moscow (we journeyed between the two overnight by train - the Red Arrow). I studied Russian at school, took it at A-Level, hence the trip, but buggered if I can remember much of it now. Mind you, I barely remember what I did ten minutes ago these days. Winter Palace and The Hermitage were amazing and a rather stern but impressive Soviet officer striding imperiously past us at the Winter Palace impressed me greatly at the time. The other thing I’ve never forgotten about that trip, odd as it may sound, is how many of the shops had rows of cabbages as their window display. Just cabbages. I kid you not. Anyway the point of my ramble is that I recall it started to snow while we were in Leningrad, first they’d had that winter as I recall, which gave me an odd thrill at the time, knowing from books and films how severe it was going to get.
Hello Wobbler! I have been in Leningrad at least once, during the winter 1979 - 80 with a group of history students, yes Hermitage was very elegant. But when one went to the side streets of Nevsky Prospect one saw that people kept their milk and even plucked chickens between their outer and inner windows, so it seems that many of them did not have refrigerators. And yes winters here can be harsh; too cold or too much snow but usually I like winters even if days are short here in mid winter. Now the time is 8:59 AM here, so 26 minutes to sunrise. And -10.5 deg. C. Happy Christmas Juha
Hi Juha, I was told that whatever they had a lot of at the time, then that would be what you would see in all the shops. Our teacher (she was ex-pat Czech, fluent in Russian) told us before the trip that scented soap was very popular in the USSR and so I duly took a few bars of Shield soap with me and handed them out to the bemused ladies that used to sit at a desk on each floor of our hotel. I was only 17 so it seemed great at the time, but now I think it must have been quite patronising. Still, who knows, maybe they did love the soap! She also said to take chewing gum with us and, yes, the kids who hung around the hotel did appear to go mad for that. One day there was a knock at our hotel room door and two men were asking us if we had anything to sell, especially jeans, which were apparently much in demand in the USSR at that time. However, our wily teacher had also warned us to NOT sell anything we had to anyone as the police there would sometimes try to trap you, so we said “nyet” to them. Whether the Soviet rozzers would have bothered trying to trap school kids into illegal trading, who knows, but better safe than sorry. Anyway, I’m straying off topic, sorry. Love your photo by the way although sunrise at half nine in the morning is a strange concept for me . Hyvää Joulua! Martin
Hello Martin! Well, we Finns were not so careful. Personally, I didn’t sell anything, but one of the guys asked me to be his bodyguard when he went out to trade with the black market traders. And during a later trip to Moscow, my girlfriend at the time, nowadays my wife, sold tights. She, an economist, explained that she only alleviated the shortage of supply. The problem was what to do with the acquired rubles. When entering and leaving the Soviet Union, you had to declare the rubles and other currencies you had, as well as on departure. And anyway rubles were practically useless outside the SU. To somehow stick to the subject of the thread a couple of pictures from a decade ago. See why we have snow guard above our porch /veranda. One day, most of the snow piled up above our living room set off at once and its mass bent the end of the snow guard on the living room side and even tear off one of its fasteners. How about a sundown at 15:13/3.13 PM? Merry Christmas Juha
We had a brief and shallow dusting of white here near Boston yesterday, but the rain washed it away today. It was a typical New England sort of day, gray, wet, chilly, dark, generally miserable. Ideal Calvinist weather. I used the window fridge in college [=uni]. This was in the Hudson Valley, where the winters got very cold. One winter there I bought a submarine sandwich, ate half of it, and decided to save the rest for the morrow. There was a heavy wire screen on the other side of the windowpane, so I tucked the sandwich between the windowpane and the screen. The next morning I woke up to a terrible grating racket coming from the window. A squirrel was gnawing his way through the wire screen to get at the sandwich.