Scary Weather

I am well aware that I am luckier than many people, and the weather I've dealt with has been nothing compared to floods and storms elsewhere. On the other hand, it was quite bad enough for me!

I dropped bear off at school this morning, then tootled into Morrisons car park to pick up some parcels I had sent to the Amazon locker. Between dropping off bear (maybe a spot of light drizzle) and picking up the parcels (the skies had opened and rain was coming down in sheets) was around five minutes. It was teeming. Then I drove very carefully to Aldi (scary heavy rain, not much visibility, lots and lots of water on the road) where I got drenched picking up the pasta bake sauce that had been requested. As it was still hammering down I called in to Tesco for a hot drink and a wait. It was still like a power shower outside, you could see the rain running off the smoking shelter like it was being hosed down.

I called in at the park, as I thought it would be nice to sit for a little under the trees and enjoy the cool rain. The first issue I had was that I had to drive through what I thought was just a wide, shallow puddle but instead was a pond, and then, when I parked up, I either had the windows open with rain lashing in onto my knitting or the car steamed up like a sweat box. I was glad to get home.

The journey to pick up bear wasn't easy, either. On the way, there was a heavy shower and the gutter was running with water. Again, I thought it was a normal puddle, but it was a serious amount of water and I was really worried about getting water in the engine. I took it steady in low gear and kept everything crossed. On the way back, the water had drained away as it had briefly stopped raining, but you could see the grates at the side of the road had been displaced through the force of the water being pushed through the drains.

When I parked up to wait for bear, it was by this beck.

You can see water gushing from a drain cover and the vegetation getting drowned.

As I said, it was drier on the way back, but the weather is still hit and miss. I parked up and went in to my home, and there were a few spots of drizzle. It was still only faintly damp when I went back to pick up the phone I forgot.  However I got considerable wetter when, two minutes later, I went to get the parcels I had forgotten and it had started teeming.

Today was the last lesson from bear's awesome piano teacher. He has been teaching bear for almost exactly five years. Bear and I are so sad, but understand the decision. The lovely violin teacher should be able to help out, at least for the first few grades. We haven't had bear sit music exams up to now, as we didn't think the extra pressure was worth it. Now we are considering the situation, as if bear gets to a good grade, it can help towards his university applications. If we are going to do them, it would be better if it was at a time before the scary GCSEs, and it looks like it is all in hand. I'm going to really miss bear's piano teacher, though. He has seen us go through so much, has been incredibly understanding, wonderfully patient with bear and generally been amazing. It feels like a very sad day.

Writing stuff - my response to the writing challenge is here. It is, I think, a reasonable reflection of the medieval mindset. Anyone can join in, and it doesn't have a timer on it. Rogier wrote an amazing story which he linked yesterday from last week's challenge.

Hugs to all.