it rained

It turned out that the Systems Administrator had not been watching the cricket, because it rained all day yesterday in Chelmsford and so the SA and friends had to content themselves with a curry instead.  The rain was very late to arrive here.  As evening drew on it began to drizzle lightly, and I held off watering the pots outside because the Met Office forecast was adamant that heavy rain was expected for twelve solid hours and there didn't seem any point in watering them if they were going to be soaked anyway.  Two hours after they said it was raining there was still nothing but drizzle, and the SA showed me on the rain radar how vast areas of downpour were engulfing London and the Home Counties, moving north but staying just the other side of Colchester.

Eventually in the night it began to rain, and by morning there was a good inch of water in the green garden tubs standing by the front door.  The tubs have sloping sides, so there was not as much as an inch of actual rain, and while I could have measured the diameter of the top and bottom of the tub and calculated the ratio of their areas and so the depth of rain that had fallen on the garden, I didn't, but it must have been a useful amount.

The rain has been followed not by marvelously fresh, clean air and clear skies, but by cloud and gusty wind.  Isn't that the way with British summers?  It was one of the reasons why we gave up sailing, too many holidays spent scuttling from port to port in half a gale punctuated by two or three days spent sitting watching a full gale.

The Systems Administrator helped me sort out my remaining photos for the music society website. I was convinced I had Adobe Photoshop on my laptop, but that must have been on my old machine.  I now have the free editing software paint.NET installed.  I don't really understand why people want to give me free software, but if they do that's fine.  The Polish accordionist's website defeated even the SA's attempts to download a photo in any format my machine could process, and so I learned to do screen grabs as well.  I thought when volunteering to help with the music society's website that the main benefit to me would be forcing me to learn stuff I wouldn't otherwise.  It means the SA is de facto volunteering as well, but I did check that would be OK before going ahead.

This evening I am due to talk about the woodland charity.  I have checked through the slides (or technically speaking digital images, but I still think of them as slides), since I haven't done the talk for a while, and had a look at the charity's website to see what's new.  If you put your location into a search box on the charity's website it will list the local woods open to the public, in ascending order of distance away from you.  There is only one small snag, which is that it fails to take account of the coastline of Essex and so believes that Southminster is less than ten miles from West Mersea.  It might be, if you are a seagull, but not when you have to drive off the island and all the way up to Maldon to cross the river Blackwater before heading back out into the Dengie Peninsula.