hailstorm

Today's gardening was brought to an end by a stiff hailstorm.  I'd been listening to the low rumble of thunder some way off for a while, poised to pack up my tools and scurry for shelter if a shower reached us.  The sky gradually darkened, and when the first squall hit I took that as my cue to move pretty smartly.  Bucket of tools, check, bucket of bonemeal, check, bucket of 6X, check.  It can be hard to keep track of tools.  I left the hand weeding fork the Systems Administrator gave me out on the gravel the other day, and only found it was missing when I wanted to use it, then it was a question of trying to remember where I'd last had it.

It was a dramatic hailstorm.  By the time I'd shut the garage door, and made my way up to the study, a mixture of rain and hail was lashing diagonally against the windows, and the borders where I'd Strulched them were turning white.  It didn't last very long, but the air that followed in its wake was so cold that I didn't fancy going back outside, quite apart from the fact that everything was now wet.

It's still better weather than on this day last year.  That was scheduled to be the beekeepers' candle making day, which had to be postponed because it was snowing.  The SA and I were due to go for supper at the Thai restaurant in Harwich, and put that off as well, since we didn't fancy the drive in the conditions.  The reason why I remember the date is that it is the SA's birthday.

Today we have continued the tradition of postponing the SA's birthday meal, but this time because the SA has a cold, and was not in any state to munch through one of Manningtree's finest wood-oven cooked pizzas.  We had planned to go to the Italian, which I've visited a couple of times with my plant centre colleagues, and found very satisfactory.  Good food and a nice buzz to it.  We'll go when the SA is better.  If I were still working at the plant centre, I'd have been at work today. Admittedly, the cold took the gloss off the birthday, but still it was still nice not to have to go in.  It is Sunday, after all.