Rick's b.log - entry 2026/01/06

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I didn't go to work 😥

So I got myself ready for work, had a bowl of Golden Grahams warmed in the microwave and my necessary two mugs of tea (otherwise I'm a zombie) and went out back to put the fan heater into my car for the final ten minutes to warm it up.
Remember - it's an electric car, so all internal heating takes from the battery, rather than being a useful side effect of combustion.

In order to make this work, I had to push my car a few metres forward so it is closer to the socket that I use for charging.
That's when a fundamental problem became quite clear.

Yesterday evening it was chucking it down. Heavy snow with big flakes in town, rain by the time I made it home, and a mix of rain and snow when I took Anna for a stroll. This meant that my car was quite wet.

And last night the temperature dropped. In fact, at 9.30am it hit -8.1°C here, which means it ties with the coldest that I have recorded (the 28^th February 2018). I think the winter of 2002-2003 was colder, but I didn't have anything recording it. The local area will have said something like -5°C, but since I live in a dip it is often a couple of degrees colder than whatever is actually forecast. Yay...

Adding all of this together meant that my car was not going to budge. I had to open the passenger door, my side was frozen shut, and pop open the boot. Then I pushed and pulled and... nope, it wasn't going to shift. My car weighs 425kg (unladen). By comparison an average family car is three or four times that - for example a Citroën C3 is 1,226kg for the petrol version, and 1,494kg for electric.
Accordingly, me being able to push my car by myself? Totally doable. I used to do it a lot with my previous car when I wanted to wash or vacuum it because I didn't like the idea of running the engine for the thirty seconds it takes to go around front.

Frozen solid. Won't budge even the tiniest bit. I didn't try driving as the motor is capable of delivering quite a lot of torque at low speeds - the motor is directly connected to the drive system, it doesn't go by way of variable pulleys like the diesel engine, so every speed my car is capable of is handled by the motor. The only gearing is the doodah that makes the car able to move in reverse.
This means that the motor would be more than capable of freeing frozen wheels.
But it also means that there's a real risk of it doing so destructively, because the weakest link will break and if that's not the ice......

Speaking of ice, it turns out to have been a good call by my car. I went to take some photos and discovered that the access lane up by the pond, partially sheltered from the snow, was a sheet of ice from yesterday's rain having frozen. All in all, not a great idea to go out. I am far from any road that would have been salted or ploughed. School buses were cancelled (by prefectorial order) and goods vehicles over 7.5t were ordered to get off the roads. And since the way into work is smaller roads, I can't imagine any of them were in a usable state.

The French Minister of Transport has rebuked Météo France for underestimating the situation, especially in the Ile-de-France region. What fell was around 8cm in Paris, 10cm around Deux-Sèvres and the Vendée, and up to 30cm 😱 in Charente-Maritime. Makes the 2-3cm here seem rather timid in comparison, doesn't it?
There have already been two fatalities in central Paris in road accidents, and three more in the Landes. I can't help but think that the cold, which hit -13°C in the Orne, may have claimed a few lives as well. As for road accidents without fatalities... numerous photos on the Ouest-France website of cars in ditches.

I am supposed to be going to the kiné at 4pm. That means I'll be leaving three and a half hours from now (as I write this) and while the sun has been out, it is still a little over three below zero and coming up really slowly. Somehow I just don't see my car defrosting in time, but more than that, I don't see the snow and ice going away in time. It's noon and little has changed since this morning. I'll update this blog entry or post a comment to let you know.

Amazon thinks that the optocoupler that I ordered in order to hook my microcontroller to the Linky TIC output in order to read the "téléinformation" might be delivered today. I would be surprised if the postal service is working normally today, and if the friendly woman who delivers my parcels is actually doing her round and takes one look at my driveway and nopes out, I can't say I'd blame her. It can come tomorrow...

For now, however, enjoy some photos of weather that doesn't happen that often around here. And, to be honest, the snow isn't really the problem. It's little more than a dusting to make everything sparkle. The problem is the ice underneath.

Looking east, and you can see how trees lessened the snow.

Looking ENE, no trees so the snow is deeper here.
Did there used to be a road/track along here to the field barn? 🤷

Iced windows on the front door, and a ~~rusty~~ rustic decoration.

My heater, showing it is 5C in my bedroom.

I guess it's about time I turned the heater in my bedroom on.

Update at 7.30pm

I did the journey at around 25ish. That's about 15 to you Brits. In the places where I could follow the tracks of previous cars, or where the sun had melted away the snow, it wasn't bad. But places where trees cast shadows were ice rinks.

I got there, did some exercises, then went home. I still don't really understand why my doctor didn't just hand me a sheet of paper and say "do these exercises", it would have been so much simpler.

Parked next to me was a huge car, an automatic. I'm not sure if the car or the driver failed to understand "softly!" as the front wheels would start spinning and the car would just drift. I suggested trying the downhill way out of the car park, as dragging that tank up the hill was simply not working. He even had it easier as he backed in so could just go forwards. It took a couple of tries but he got out of the parking space and down through the car park.
My turn. Well, having a slow car with a direct link between the motor and wheels allowed me a pretty good level of control, and actually I think having a light car helped out here as the front wasn't trying to drag a heavy back. I reversed out of the space, turned, and then drove away like I knew what I was doing. Not one single slip or skid. I noticed the two kiné women watching so I waved and they were "oh god, he saw us watching" about it. ☺

Going home, same routine, take it slow. A quarter hour journey took nearly forty minutes, but hey, better late than dead right?
I called the shorter route hill correctly. Going up it (on the sunny side) was no problem. Going down the other side, I let the car descend at 20 (12mph) because it was caked-on snow. There's next to no way I would have had traction going up this.

Eventually I made it back home, and around the side in the snow I slowed down and pulled the handbrake (connected to the back wheels) to see what would happen. I'm kind of depressed that I barely slid to a halt, as if I just used the regular brakes. Maybe I was going too slowly? I wasn't up for doing any crazy stuff. But I did have the wheels spin for a few seconds when going again, this time in reverse to back into the hangar. Well, that's fine. I don't care if the wheels spin out beside the house. It's not a big deal. Ten kilometres away on a dark and dismal road? That's a big deal. But not home.

It is already -3°C at half seven. It is supposed to be a cold night again, but less cold than last night. And then, in the early hours (like 5am or something) it'll warm up a bit and chuck it down. Onto frozen ground. I think I'll be driving real slow on the way into work tomorrow.

Thursday is supposed hit 12°C. Halla-bloody-looyah! It'll be like spring has arrived! Indeed, I think the low of 4°C is warmer than it is in the kitchen. The living room and kitchen is colder than the bedroom (because no insulation or double glazing) and it was 5°C in the bedroom this morning (see above picture). I will need to be careful about opening the windows though, that sort of temperature shift can have condensation on the walls.

Well, whatever. I made it to my back stretching exercises and back again, which is my first time driving in snow. I hope I'll be good for work tomorrow (apparently a lot of people didn't go in today, so it wasn't just me) and it won't be a sheet of ice. And, after that, with any luck the nastiness of winter will be done.

You know, it wasn't that long ago I was saying that 14°C was a bit abnormal for midwinter. It shows what a difference a change in wind direction can be - whether your winds bring up the heat from the south or the cold from the north. And when the whether system is large enough, it can drag down polar cold. That's what this was.

Driving that, and the cold in general, has frazzled my mind, so I think I'll heat a ready meal and just go to bed. I might listen to my ebook reader narrating The Call Of Cthulhu.

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