Rick's b.log - 2020/02/09
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Waiting for Spring

If you have the Google Street View app (the app, not Street View as a part of Google Maps), you can view this by tapping on the little camera icon on the lower right, then tapping on "Import 360° photos", and finally by choosing the downloaded picture.

It's hard finding signs of Spring in early February. It's clear that there is more daylight, but it's also quite likely colder than the rest of winter. As I write this, just before noon on Sunday, we're waiting for storm Ciara to come and go - half of France is on alert, with 35 départements on orange alert for violent wind. The forecast is for the winds to touch 140 km/h as the storm heads inland over Paris and towards Belgium. That would be a 13 on the extended Beaufort scale, which is described simply as "Catastrophic". Let's hope it calms down instead.

That said, it's the hardly little dandelion that pokes its head up to catch the growing winter sun.

As for the trees, the first to flower is the Sweet Almond, which is saying "not yet".

Walking back, I checked the Oak.

And the not-Bird Cherry (it is a self-sown hybrid of Bird Cherry and some sort of domestic Cherry).

And, finally, the Sakura (ornamental pink cherry).

Just beside the Sakura was a surprise, the sprawling lavender just shrugged off the cold.

It's a different story this morning. The dandelions took one look at the weather report and said "just NO", so it's up to the lavender to brave the weather. Right now it is raining gentry. Well, I say "raining" but that usually implies drops of weather falling from the clouds to the ground, right? These are travelling horizontally.

Your comments:

Rick, 10th February 2020, 08:46

No, it got worse. Around 177kph touching nearly 200kph. We're far off the top of the Beaufort scale and into Typhoon categories.  https://www.ouest-france.fr/meteo/tempete/tempete-cia ra-le-vent-se-renforce-42-departements-en-vigilance-orange-67285 79

Rick, 10th February 2020, 08:47

Thankfully I'm in a dip which means it is often frosty and cold in the winter, but in the other hand the wind pretty much passed overhead.

David Pilling, 10th February 2020, 23:06

A neighbour has a weather station which is on the internet. Sunday and Monday we have had one gust over 60mph, call it 100Kmh. It's pretty windy but I've seen worse.