Snow, wind and steamed up glasses

So we woke up to this this morning:

From the kitchen window

Ditto

From the bedroom window

 

Up the track

From the road above - our house is pretty much in the middle of this photo

It's now mid afternoon and the snow has gone from the trees. Still plenty on the ground, but it's melting fast. Instead we're now on Red Alert for high winds coming this evening. Hope I get back from teaching flute in Scarriff before it hits.

We were supposed to be going up to the new house this morning to meet the carpenter, but we were delayed by the snow. As always it's the steep hills that are the problem. Anyway, back when we had the last Big Snow Joe bought chains for the car. Time to try them out. It took a good half hour and both of us to work out the instructions, but finally one front wheel had a chain on it. We decided that would be enough and set off. Out we went, slowly, onto the road where the snow had turned all slushy. No problem after that. Off with the chain and onto the house in Derrycon.

We were working in Derrycon on Monday and yesterday, putting rock wool insulation into the gaps between timbers on the internal walls and ceilings. This is the ceiling in the kitchen showing the gaps.

The rock wool isn't for heat retention but as a silencer between rooms, and the difference is tremendous. Walking around upstairs on the uninsulated floorboards was rackety and loud. Insulated bits were quiet. Simple as that.

Not a nice job though. Rock wool isn't as nasty to work with as fibreglass insulation, but it still makes you itch. The first day I wore overalls, lots of thermal underwear and woolly things, a face mask, a hat. I was too hot, but that was easy to deal with. Off with the woolly jumper etc. The main problem was the glasses steaming up because of the face mask - even though there's a nose clip, air escapes upwards and steams you up. In the end Joe and I both had to take off the glasses.

In order to place the correct size piece of insulation into the wall or ceiling they of course had to be cut. This involved measuring. But neither Joe nor I could see as we'd had to take off our glasses. We developed a method where the one up the ladder measured the gap and handed the tape down to the other, finger gripping the 40 cm mark or whatever. I was working in inches and Joe in centimetres - I could just about see the inch marks but not the centimetres.

When we got home after the first day we'd completed the study and some of the ceiling in the hall:

But we both had really itchy eyes. Boiled and cooled teabags on the eyes helped, but we were going to have to use goggles, especially as we'd be doing a big stretch of ceiling next.

The trouble is with goggles you steam up as with glasses, but years ago when I had a moped we used to put a bit of washing-up liquid on the visor of the helmet to stop this. Indeed it does stop you steaming up. Instead everything is smeary. However I did discover an interesting side effect. I have astigmatism, so writing and numbers are double or in triplicate. If I look at the figure 1 it's unclear whether it's a 1, 11 or 111. But with the smeary goggles the numbers magically revealed themselves.

Still steamed up in the end though. Amazing how much you can see even when half your vision is blocked.

Still a way to go. Let's hope the wind allows us out tomorrow.

The Freeze - Day Nine

When I got a text yesterday from Scarriff Community College saying the school would be closed today I was surprised. The local primary school has been closed since last week, but the secondary school stayed open. The Scarriff roads were gritted and free from snow last week but now there's freezing fog down there in the valley and the roads are lethal. I suspect they've had less students each day as the conditions settled into solid ice.

At least I don't have to make a decision about whether to try to get into the school for the lunchtime trad music group I've been involved in. I really had thought I'd be going to that today. That conditions would be better.
 
The ice is getting thicker on the flat bridge. We've put down a trail of ash from the range and the sitting room stove which helps with the walking, but there's no way we'd get a vehicle across it. And even though we left the car at Ryan's Bridge a five-minute walk away, I don't think we'd get that out today either. I'm supposed to be teaching tomorrow. We'll see what happens.

It's raw today with a north wind. Outside is very quiet. No distant sounds at all. Standing in the garden it felt as though the world had closed in to our little valley. Our muscles have become used to walking in ice and snow so we stride up the hill to the top where everything is cold and still. It's slower coming down. Going out towards the main road is getting awkward. The strip of snow up the middle, the safe place for walking, is narrowing from the few vehicles that have passed up and down.

As always I wonder how the birds can survive such harsh conditions, especially the tiny ones. I'm putting out food two or three times a day. I counted 26 chaffinches this morning. The blackbirds and fieldfares are still busy at the apples - 27 fieldfares the other day and 16 blackbirds. I've been hacking

Bird bath ice shapes

ice-bound apples out of piles tipped off the lawn in autumn and scattering them under the apple tree where there's less snow and ice to provide food for a few days more.

Under the hanging bird bath is evidence of the continuing freeze - ice shapes from previous days' upending of the water container. I haven't seen any birds using it yet. It's fairly new and they're suspicious. Or perhaps they're getting their drinking water elsewhere. Not from the garden pond though. That's solid with ice.

The skies look as though we may get more snow. There was a sprinkling this morning. There's a thaw promised for Thursday but it's beginning to feel as though this is the world now. We're into a steady rhythm of getting in fuel, trying to keep pathways safe to walk on, feeding the birds. We have become insular. A strange inertia has settled on the house which has become a place of hibernation. I've stopped being anxious about things. It feels like it will be more and more difficult to go out into the world again.

December and it snowed.

The forecast was wrong. Very wrong. We woke yesterday morning to snow. We weren't supposed to get snow. I checked and checked different online forecasts and listened to every report on the radio. Dublin and Wicklow were to get it, not us. Even when the electric meter man said we would have snow on Monday night we thought he must be wrong. Instead he was probably listening to Clare FM who had a much better idea of what was going on than the regional reporters. So we didn't go into Scarriff for supplies while we had the chance.

As I said in the last blog, it's not the snow as such that causes us problems, it's the snow half thawing and compacting into ice. If you can get out before the major compacting and refreezing you have a chance so yesterday we made a run to the shop in Flagmount. Annette said she'd never had such a busy Tuesday morning. In everyone's mind was the freeze in January when people were trapped in their houses for a week or more.

The 'main' road

So this morning we walked to the main road. This is the Gort to Scarriff road reported on Clare FM - the only road in the county mentioned - as being particularly treacherous. The road is a pure white compaction of snow with ice underneath - an ice rink.

It's all very beautiful of course, and I thought I'd love it, but I'm finding myself anxious. I should be teaching flute this afternoon/evening but have had to cancel. Even if I did get in at 5 miles an hour (so an hour and a half to get there), the thought of driving home in the dark with the temperature plummeting by the second is not appealing. In fact it would be stupid. Tomorrow I'll miss my poeting in Galway, a treat of the week, my city buzz.

The broadband is flaky. It's entirely possible the deep well pump will freeze and we'll be breaking the ice on the small river to get a supply.

Ha ha. And we might not get out til Thursday week.

Stop complaining woman! We have a winter's worth of fuel in the shed. The pantry is full of food and so is the freezer. We've a whole Christmas cake to eat (I can always make another one). And the small dog is in heaven scooting about in the snow.

Looking over to Lough Graney from the end of our road.

The Beginning

A leap into blogland on this wild and wintry March night. I live in East Clare in a cottage in the hills. I'm amazed the broadband is still working. Wind and rain and ice and snow get into the workings across the valley where the box that does things sits on Paddy Tuohy's barn roof. The signal has to come from Tountinna Mountain beside Lough Derg, past the Scarriff factory to the barn across the valley from me. Bounce, and over to the box on my roof. There's a lot that can go wrong.

I'm glad we brought Winter Solstice down from Shannon Harbour to Portumna on Sunday. Wind and rain are no fun when you're boating. We had to travel on one engine as the other one wouldn't start. It can be difficult berthing as the boat wants to go in a circle.