Google analytics

Tuesday 4 April 2017

Mother Nature's April Fool's Joke

I mean, we all thought we had seen the last of last winter's snow The last remnants were almost gone, and Spring officially started a week or two back - then out of the blue came this winter storm on the last night of March and April 1st.


Of course this just happened to be the morning that Liz and I had planned to drive the 60-odd miles from St Johnsbury in Vermont to Berlin in New Hampshire.


National Route 2 runs East - West across the northern edge of Mount Washington, which is the tallest mountain in the eastern United States, at 6,289 feet. For my readers who are not aware of it, the second highest wind speed ever recorded on the Earth's surface was 231 mph (372 km/h) at the observatory on the peak of the mountain in April 1934.


Fortunately our sprightly Volvo C30 has studded winter tires and, with me driving (Liz gets quite nervous in those conditions), the weather presented no problems, although the road was quite treacherous at times. I was reminded of a winter weekend way back in the '60s when, while stationed at RNAS Lossiemouth, the squadron aircrew drove across northern Scotland to the Altnacealgath Hotel in Ledmore, and had to dig our vehicles out of snow drifts. That was one of the last times I was to see snow for 42 years! 


I am writing this on Tuesday, April 4th. We did have more snow forecast for today but the temperature is up to 40˚ (4˚C) with rain and a week from today is forecast to be 71˚F (21˚C). 

To completely change the subject, I wrote a while back about nepotism, in particular when related to Jacob Zuma. I never imagined at that time (four years ago) that a president of the United States would be openly practicing nepotism, but that appears to be more and more so. The gaudy materialistic person now in charge of this country seems to be going the same way as Jacob Zuma. Like Zuma he seems incapable of running the country, knowing nothing about politics or the way Washington works. In short, he is out of his depth, and covers every setback by tweeting that it is all the lying press and false news.