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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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Weather

(Ex) Hurricane Ophelia
EuropeHome lifeIrelandWeather

Ophelia

It’s going to be an interesting day. (I leave aside the local confusion over whether to properly refer to this storm “Hurricane Ophelia” or “Ex-Hurricane Ophelia.” Never mind: here she is, not so much emitting snatches of song as gusts of wind, and strewing leaves all over everything instead of flowers.

This is as much a status report as anything else (and I guess I can update the post over the course of the day if anything interesting happens locally, though mostly I’ll probably be on Twitter, using the #Ophelia hashtag, like a lot of the rest of the country. If I fall silent there it’s more likely to be due to local power loss than anything else, and I’ll let everybody know as soon as possible before the fact — our broadband is cellular and runs on batteries, so even after a power failure I’ll still have network access for a good while.

This is also to reassure people who might routinely follow me and be concerned. Peter and I are not in the direct storm track. The track as presently projected calls for Ophelia to head up the west coast of the country. Peter and I live in one of the easternmost counties, Wicklow, close to where it borders on County Kildare.

Nonetheless the whole country was last night tagged by Met Eireann, the Irish national weather service, as a Red Weather Alert area, the warning being for “Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150 km/h countrywide and in excess of these values in some very exposed hilly and coastal areas.” As the storm is big enough to span the entire island, we’ll naturally be feeling its effects over on this side.

As I write this (0950 UTC) the northern fringe of the storm has made landfall in the southwest of the country and nearly 100,000 people have already lost power. In that part of the world, flooding is also going to be a huge issue (as it routinely has in the past with lesser storms), and we’re all watching that situation with a lot of concern. The storm surge is also going to be problematic on both the west and east costs, with a strong south wind coming up the Irish Sea this afternoon and evening, pushing sea levels up by as much as a meter in the storm surge period.

In our own area, the forecasts right now seem to indicate that a fair amount of rain will fall over the course of the day (40-50mm) but most of the trouble is going to be caused by high winds bringing trees down — especially since the trees still have a lot of leaves on them, even here on the high ground — and people losing power. This happens to us at least once every couple of years due to storm/wind damage in this very rural area, and we’re well prepared for it.

Let me reassure everybody who might be concerned that, based on previous experience of long periods of much heavier rain, our house is in no danger from flooding. We are about fifty miles west of the Irish Sea. Our cottage  sits on high ground, more than 120m / 400ft above sea level and in an area of quite “sharp” drainage. Slopes here are acute enough so that even in the wildly unlikely case that the ground around us gets saturated, what water can’t sink in will run off downhill.

My main concern at the moment is about the line of very tall and handsome, and old, beech trees in the estate property across the road from us. Every now and then one of them says “That’s it, I’ve had it…” and falls over when the next big storm hits it. Those trees are just tall enough to hit our house if the storm put too much strain on them… and there’s no way to tell when this is going to happen. All the warning you get (as in a previous year when a tree in the neighboring field pulled this stunt and took the nearest power line down) is a loud rushing noise reminiscent of a sound clip from a recording of a large waterfall, and then a dull THUMP. Believe me when I tell you that my ears are going to spend the day being cocked for that waterfall-y “whooooooosh” sound. Additionally, since our broadband is cellular and subject to network overload or interference by bad weather, especially rain, it means checking every now and then to make sure we’re still getting bandwidth.

While all this goes on, my work day will be progressing as originally planned: updating the backups on my main work computer and doing other file-organization-related scutwork. This is actually a perfect day to be doing this kind of thing, as it requires no creativity whatsoever. (Writing isn’t going to be possible for me until this thing passes over: there’s no way I can get settled into serious work while also constantly listening for whoooooshTHUMP.) Anyway, if you want to cheer me up while I’m trapped in this godawful drudgery, feel free to stop in to the Ebooks Direct store and grab yourself some reading material.The store has an app that makes my iPad go “kaching” when someone makes a purchase, and if it does that every now and then I won’t have to keep checking to see if the broadband’s still working.

Meanwhile the national broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann / RTÉ has (on its RTÉ 1 channel) gone over to continuous all-news format to cover the storm, with reports constantly coming in from around the country. Those of you who’re interested may be able to access video and/or streaming coverage at this URL for the RTE Player. Also, RTÉ Radio 1’s daytime shows will (if I’m guessing correctly) be all about Ophelia.

Anyway: everybody who’s tweeted or mailed me with messages of concern — thanks! We’re as ready as we can be: we’ll see what happens next…

Ophelia was last modified: October 16th, 2017 by Diane Duane

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October 16, 2017
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Central Park in the snow
New YorkRandom musingsWeather

It looks like snow

Or maybe I’m just indulging in wishful thinking.

Of course snow causes all kinds of trouble…but I wish I were in New York right now. Or rather, that I was there as the heavy stuff started to fall, and the city went silent. It’s one of the few times you get to hear NY that way (or not hear it).

Peter and I were incredibly lucky a few years ago to be there for one of those magic nights/mornings. We had flown in just before Thanksgiving, and the night we arrived, the snow began. We had crashed for a little while after arriving, jet lag being what it is… but we woke up about two in the morning to find that about two inches of snow had already fallen, and it was coming down harder every moment. We got ourselves sorted out and spent the whole rest of the night walking the streets, enjoying it…stopping into this or that all-night place for a Little Something every now and then (Big Nick’s at Broadway and 77th being one of the best of these. Okay, so it’s not strictly an all-night place…they close for an hour, I think between 3 and 4 AM. Big deal). Shortly after dawn we were in Central Park playing in the snow with everybody’s dogs, making snow angels and otherwise acting like eight-year-olds.

Heaven. I was so glad P. had had a chance to see the city that way, the streets empty or nearly so — the only sound being the occasional jing-jing-jing of the chains on a snowplow as it passed. And the next morning, of course, people cross-country skiing up Fifth Avenue…

We have had the occasional blizzard here, but not nearly enough of them for my taste. During the last one we were distracted from taking endless pictures of it because we were about to head off to Switzerland on business: the thought that snow at home might prevent us from getting to Zurich was a little too much irony for me to appreciate. However, it all sorted itself out — we dug a hole through the four-foot drift that had piled itself across the road in front of the house, and the taxi got to us eventually. And in Zurich (where it was raining) they listened to the story in disbelief. “Snow? In Ireland? It snows in Ireland? We thought it was always green there…”

Yeah, well. Let’s see what it does today. It’s cold enough, and the clouds have that threatening, slightly torn-up-at-the-edges look…. Maybe. Maybe.

It looks like snow was last modified: July 2nd, 2017 by Diane

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December 8, 2003
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Previously on “Out Of Ambit”…

  • CrossingsCon 2019: I’ll be there!

  • Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

    2018 Hugo Award eligibility: for those...

  • At Ebooks Direct: last chance to...

  • Feline Wizardry covers

    The full Feline Wizards series now...

  • Dave Gemmell's Brownies

    Dave Gemmell’s Brownies

  • Charlemagne and the Snake

  • (Ex) Hurricane Ophelia

    Ophelia

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