mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu
I didn’t go to work 😥
I got up at 7am and walked across the field to feed Anna. There was snow, lots of snow. But only about an inch or two deep depending upon how exposed it was. Given that it was so cold, the snow was pretty solid. My footsteps barely made any impression, and the roughness of the snow meant that it wasn’t at all slippery. Yes, I tried. Yes, I’m an idiot. ☺
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 ef…
mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu
I didn’t go to work 😥
I got up at 7am and walked across the field to feed Anna. There was snow, lots of snow. But only about an inch or two deep depending upon how exposed it was. Given that it was so cold, the snow was pretty solid. My footsteps barely made any impression, and the roughness of the snow meant that it wasn’t at all slippery. Yes, I tried. Yes, I’m an idiot. ☺
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 28th 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 south east.
The ragondin (coypu) has been out and about.
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? 🤷
Looking (east) up the front of the house.
Iced windows on the front door, and a rusty rustic decoration.
I guess it’s about time I turned the heater in my bedroom on.
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- I didn’t go to work :( (2026/01/06)
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Have you noticed the watermarks on pictures?