Wild Weather

June means short days, long dark nights and this year plenty of thunder and lightning. According to a meteorologist on TV it has been an 'exceptional' period of bad weather rather than a new pattern of weather due to climate change. ParkRun was cancelled on Saturday because the river flooded the track and by the end of the weekend Otaihanga Domain was full of water and a couple of tornadoes had blown through Waikanae. Alison had a cracked window and a tree blew down. I got off lightly with a worsening leak in the porch roof. 

The forecast didn't look so bad a week ago. It quickly changed to warnings of heavy swells, gale force wind and severe thunder and lightning storms.

Water on the Waikanae River track. 

Extreme Weather

It rained all last weekend and it has rained most of this weekend. Both Sunday temperatures plunged to 15°C and were windy as well. Today the whole North Island copped the remnants of Cyclone Dovi with flooding, wind damage and cool temperatures. But it hasn't been too depressing for me because I have been on annual leave and enjoyed the sunshine and being outdoors during the week. I was productive during the rain and made two skirts. I was productive during the fine weather and tackled several garden jobs. I did the Nikau Reserve up and down twice on Wednesday morning and sweated buckets. The temperature reached 28°C that day but the view from the top was excellent (twice). 

The wait for Omicron to dig its claws into the country seems to be coming to an end. In the past few days the number of cases has risen sharply from 200 to 810 daily cases (a week later on 20/2 there are 2522 cases). Café Lane and a Thai restaurant have been named as the first locations of interest in Kapiti. Fortunately Alison finished working at Café Lane a few weeks ago. The protestors outside Parliament are living in a sea of mud after the weekend rain (photo from Stuff below). It would be ironic if Covid spread through that unmasked, unvaccinated group but I guess that's a risk they are willing to take.    

 

 

Nasty Weather

What happened to summer? Yesterday it was 19°C and I enjoyed a pleasant cycle ride to and from work in very calm conditions.  Today it was 9.5°C at 2pm although  the Metservice said it 'felt like' 5°C due to the cold southerly. That blasting southerly caught my umbrella, turned it inside out and tried to carry it away. I managed to keep hold of it but the umbrella is completely wrecked and a spoke dug a hole in my thumb. 

Today's high temperature was at 2am this morning!

 

Wind, Rain and Painting

Wind and rain hasn't spoiled my annual leave this week because I've been painting the kitchen cabinets. I may have been tempted to be out and about if the sun was shining but ex-cyclone Gita's visit kept me on task in the kitchen. 

 

The Long Hot Summer

Signs that it is an unusually long, hot summer on the Kapiti Coast:

• It feels like a Waikato summer with temps of 26-28°C. Long time Kapiti residents complain about the heat when it reaches 22°!
• It's 37°in the house when I arrive home in the evening.
• Darren is wearing shorts and sandals to work.
• I'm on my second lot of lettuce and petunias, and the tomatoes are fruiting like crazy.
• It's the heat not my aging joints limiting my speed around the squash court.
• There are a few more ripe customers than usual in the library.
• People are using their heat pumps on the cooling setting for the first time.
• Day after day of blue sky, sunshine and little wind 😎

 

Summer Heat

It was 27°C in the shade under the back porch and 37°C in the house when I arrived home after work. No wonder I worked up a hot sweat cycling home in the bright sunshine today. 

Yesterday Invercargill recorded it's hottest day since records began in 1921 - 32.3°C. Yes that's right, that cool little southern city reached 32°C! 
 

Easter

The first 9 days of April, and heading into mid-autumn, have been the best weather-wise in the three months since I moved to Wellington. The weather forecasters predicted bad weather over most of Easter but they were completely wrong and Wellington has sparkled under blue skies.

We celebrated the end of the first term at Amesbury School by going out to dinner at a restaurant at Queens Wharf. We watched a Cook Strait ferry arrive as a full moon emerged over the harbour at dusk - beautiful.

On Good Friday I spent an hour and a half at Wellington airport catching up with a friend who had a stopover on her way back to Australia after a visit to Christchurch. For once I was happy about a flight delay as her plane departed Wellington half an hour later than scheduled and we fitted in a little more chat time.

I went up to Raumati South yesterday for some family and chocolate time. Alison and I hid 59 little Easter chocolates around the deck area for Zak and her partner's son Bronson to find. The final tally was one chocolate to the dog, 56 chocolates to the boys and two chocolates still missing because we couldn't remember where we hid them all. Oh well, 56 chocolates was more than enough, especially as Zak had already demolished most of a large chocolate rabbit after his bowl of cereal at breakfast time.

After some backyard badminton and a fresh from the tree, crunchy apple each (a token gesture at something nutritious) we headed down to the beach. I shivered just at the thought of the water temperature but the others, all hardier souls than I, went swimming, while I enjoyed people watching and the view. The South Island was clearly visible in the distance and from Raumati Beach there is a beautiful view up and down the coast and across to Kapiti Island.

Ears gone, five minutes later only legs left.

Snowing? In Te Awamutu? Really?

In a rare occurence today we had several flurries of snow in Te Awamutu. It didn't last long but the white stuff falling gently from the sky and swirling in the wind did look pretty for a few minutes. Nobody is talking about global warming in New Zealand today. Instead many areas of the North Island are experiencing the novelty of snow.

I was excited to see the white stuff this morning and rushed to the phone to urge my Mum to look out the window before it stopped. She talked about sleet but I'm sure there were genuine snowflakes landing on the glass. Later on there was a lovely flurry with snowflakes like white polka dots decorating the deck chairs. My sister phoned from the Kapiti Coast to share her delight about snow falling there.

The South Islanders are probably scoffing at the North Islanders as we get all excited over an itty bitty amount of snow. They are blanketed in snow for the second time this winter and of course the Southern Alps are majestic white mountains every winter. But it is so unusual to have snow in northern, low altitude areas of the country that we are enjoying the unique experience.

The woman recording the video below captured the rare event and her commentary says it all really.

How to spend a foggy, freezing Sunday morning.

Don’t get out of bed until the house is warm. The cat will let me know when it's warm enough (and she's hungry enough) to uncurl herself from the end of the bed. Hang out a load of washing and hope the fog clears so it will dry.

Read some chapters of Lethal Legacy by Linda Fairstein. It’s centred around murder and mystery at the New York Public Library. I seem to be finding library connections everywhere this year. It’s the 10th book in the Alex Cooper series I’ve read. All have settings in and about significant New York landmarks so I’ve learnt a fair bit about New York history.

Write an article for the new blog I set up on WordPress yesterday. See libstech.wordpress.com. It’s a blog for and about my university studies. More of a professional blog than this one and will include some posts that are required for my digital technologies paper. I decided to use WordPress because I wanted to try a different blogging platform and see how it compares to Blogger.

Start roaming around the WordPress blogs to see what other people are doing and how they've set their blogs up. I spent ages looking through a blog by Bridget Schaumann, who has a really good school library blog as well as an interesting personal blog. Get distracted by some entertaining YouTube videos – there goes half an hour. Check my e-mail. There's already a comment to approve on my first WordPress article!

The sun is coming out. Time to go outside and soak up a few rays.

Here is one of the entertaining YouTube videos I watched - the best of Funny Talking Animals by the BBC.

Wonderful Weird Warm Winter Weather

I am not a winter person. I feel the cold in the air as April turns to May and by June my attire is all about keeping warm not fashion. But this year I'm still waiting for the cold. I thought it might be because I don't have to get up in the cold, pre-dawn to get ready for work. One of the major bonuses of my student lifestyle is getting up in the morning when I want to. But last month was the warmest May for 100 years and today, June 5th, it was 21 degrees. I had the doors and windows open and it was a lovely balmy day. I'll make the most of it while it lasts. I'm sure Jack Frost will strike soon and the squash ball will bounce like a stone, the Impatiens will droop and die and a beanie will be my favourite item of clothing.

More Wild Wind

Today the wild wind was in Auckland when a tornado struck the suburb of Albany. What's happened to Windy Wellington? The wind news is all from northern regions at present. I found this report from a Euronews Channel on YouTube. It's in Spanish but the pictures tell the story clearly. Tornadoes like this are rare in New Zealand, only about 3 or 4 of this size every century according to the weather expert on TVNZ.

Wild Wind

It was a wild and windy day in
Te Awamutu today. I arrived at the squash club at about 11:30am and there were huge gusts of wind blasting through town. As I got inside I heard a crash as a window blew out upstairs. Some of the glass was blown onto Court 1 where a couple of young lads were playing. Luckily they weren't injured. It was also fortunate that the cleaner had forgotten to lock the cleaning cupboard. We were able to clean up the glass and get on court to play. There were sirens wailing frequently over the few next hours as the emergency services dealt with trees down and roofing materials blown off. Then the sound of chainsaws as trees were cut and cleared.



Waikato Times photos.