Tuesday 16 August 2011

Spoke too soon...

Me and my big mouth...

As we got into last weekend, I started spotting weather warnings on the news. It was hailing and snowing on Sunday night, and on Monday morning, we woke up to a light icing powder dust of snow on the hills:


This in and of itself is unusual. Whilst we do get snow in NZ (we have a thriving ski-industry), the last time it snowed in Wellington to any major level was in the seventies, and before then in 1936. No wonder, then, that we were a little ill-equipped to deal with the snow which fell steadily through Monday - it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to get home thanks to a broken down train and then frozen points (normally it's about thirty minutes door to door depending on when I arrive at the station). There was still snow on the hills when I left for work this morning, and I got a dumping of hail on me as well as I left the house.

One of my colleagues lives up the hill on the other side of the valley from us; she left early as the weather looked like closing in and they had had the snow settle overnight, making conditions very slippery going up her road. She called me when she got in to say that it was snowing very heavily in Lower Hutt and I might want to make my way home sooner rather than later. I didn't think a huge amount of it - we're pretty much at sea level, and last year we only had a couple of frosts over the whole winter, so I thought that everything would have melted by the time I got in.

Fortunately, I did take her advice (more warnings from National Office about the weather also helped to convince me) - when I got home, I was confronted with a white blanket of snow:

The Ambulance Station over the road


Our Pohutakawa tree


The garden


The very surreal sight of a fruiting Lemon tree (with a feijoa, olive and fig behind it) covered in snow. All the trees are now in the greenhouse - they may be hardy, but probably not to this extent!

The media is calling this a once in a lifetime blast - snow has got as far as Auckland ('The Winterless North') - I'm just very glad of a good gas fire!


Monday 8 August 2011

Expectations...

Well - the day of my last post was the coldest day in Wellington on record, so it was definitely a good day to stay in and read - I got 120 pages through the book - I may even pick it up again this week (it hasn't grabbed me so far...)

But the weather has flipped quite considerably - the daffodils are out, as are the snowdrops, the trees are starting to get their Spring green. It isn't quite Spring yet - the weather can't make up its mind as to whether it is going to be warm or cold (for my hockey match yesterday, I baked under all the goalie gear - we then went over the hills to the Wairarapa (the local wine growing region) and went through both a hail and a snow storm. However, the signs are there; as well as the flowers, the days are getting noticeably longer, and the wind isn't quite as chill as it has been. It does seem very odd to be coming out the other side of Winter without having really had a Winter at all!