An occasional journal
Weather
Light of Heart
Aug 16th 2017
Admin1 is reading The Blood Strand by Chris Ould. Admin2 is reading Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaitre: a bloody terrifying ‘girl’ book.
Кофе в день: Black Hole.
A Hard Rain
Aug 8th 2017
We had more rain today than in the whole of April: 14.1 mm.
Admin2 is reading Going Out by Scarlett Thomas, which was ridiculous but not in a bad way.
Rainy Day Women
Aug 1st 2017
A changeable day with sunshine, heavy rain, thunder and lightning.
Admin1 is reading Disclaimer by Renee Knight. Admin2 is reading Phone by Will Self: a 617-page paragraph with lots of… and italics and repetitions and repetitions that randomly switched protagonists in mid-sentence but was surprisingly compulsive, maybe because there was no place to stop.
Coffee of the day: Rwanda Gihombo: fruity.
Cloud of the Day: Cumulus Congestus
Jul 27th 2017
Admin1 is reading Tell No Tales by Eva Dolan, a realistically messy crime story tackling inner-city hate crimes; readable, but unconvincing villains.
Coffee of the Day: Red Giant: sublime.
Clouds That Look Like Things: Bacterium
Jul 17th 2017
This is actually a cloud of yesterday; today there were no clouds at all and the solar panels did 12.87 kWh: best day this year.
Admin1 is reading The White Road by Sarah Lotz — an interesting ghost story about potholing and mountain climbing, with an unlikeable but engaging protagonist; not a book for those worried by depths or heights. Or ghosts. Or cold. Or for claustrophobes or agoraphobes.
Admin2 is reading Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; a plane crash deconstructed.
Clouds of the Evening
Jul 15th 2017
The sky clears as the sun goes down.
Admin1 is reading Persons Unknown by Susie Steiner — superbly involving, with all the good points of Missing, Presumed plus better controlled plotting.
Cold Weather Blues
Jul 11th 2017
Today the thermometer topped at 14.0°C. Our coldest July day for at least the last seven years. Admin1 is reading Short Ride on a Fast Machine by Magnus McGrandle. which was interesting for its peeks into two subcultures of which I know nothing: bicycle couriers and backgammon. It did suffer a bit from first-novel syndrome — MM didn’t seem to quite know what sort of novel he was writing: a heist caper? A comedy? A character study? Still, entertaining enough.
Admin2 is reading Mount Misery by Samuel Shem, a darkish funnyish novel set in an American mental institution.
Grey Skies
Jul 7th 2017
Dark and turbulent clouds.
Admin1 is reading Country of the Blind by Christopher Brookmyre.
Quite Pretty One Evening
Jul 6th 2017
Handsome cumulus clouds that never developed into the storm we were anticipating on this sultry 30.6°C day. And earlier, some pileus cloud forming over cumulus:
Admin1 is reading Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre.
Noctilucent Clouds
Jul 2nd 2017
Our first noctilucent clouds of the year, photographed at 2am this morning.
We scored 9 on the Guardian Weekend quiz.
Rain, Rain, Rain
Jun 28th 2017
24 hours of continuous rain.
Admin1 is reading The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross, in which Charlie takes inordinate pleasure in attacking and destroying bits of Leeds — including the Arndale centre (sorry, center) in Headingley — with an army of psychopathic alien elves from another dimension. The hideous Quarry House also plays a central part, as does Potternewton Park, Harehills, the Leeds inner ring road, the nuclear bunker at Lawnswood Cemetery, Malham Cove and Otley. Not a brilliant book, but made readable and entertaining by its local interest. But why does Charlie insist on American spelling? Very irritating. He also seems to think it rains all the time in Leeds 
Happy Birthdays Twins
Jun 22nd 2017
Clouds of the day: A flying saucer releases a colourful ray.
And a herd of animals gallops towards a magical tree.
Admin2 is reading 1977 Red Riding by David Peace but is not enjoying the racism, sexism, gbh and constant fucking swearing.
Hottest Day Ever
Jun 19th 2017
Well, hottest day ever recorded in this location in the 7-year lifetime of our equipment: 35.0°C. Marked with a circumzenithal arc.
Crowd of the Day: Street Party
Jun 18th 2017
Manufactured event to meet the neighbours. It was a great day for it: 33.3°C and 12.47 kWh of sunshine. Admin2 sulked. Admin1 went along and won a prize.
Admin1 is reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (entertaining froth, but overlong; Adam Roberts’ Guardian review got it right, in that it’s written like a comedy without actually being very funny). Admin2 is reading Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner. And we scored 8.5, thanks to generous marking, on the Guardian Weekend Quiz.
Cloud of the Day: Map of Africa
Jun 13th 2017
Admin1 is reading Stone Coffin by Kjell Eriksson; a thoroughly gloomy book, in an irritating American translation full of typos and copy-editing errors.
A New Dawn
Jun 9th 2017
Here comes the sun after a sleepless night enjoying the results of an election that nobody won.
Halo
Jun 7th 2017
A sign of rain to come, and sure enough it arrived a few hours later, after a day of high winds and 12.74kWh of sunshine.
Admin2 is reading Stone Coffin by Kjell Eriksson which was ok but nothing special.
We Are Snailing
Jun 5th 2017
We had more rain today than in the whole of April, and it brought out all the molluscs, including this splendid red snail; another election portent.
Admin1 is reading I’m Travelling Alone by Samuel Bjork, which had a preposterous plot, a pointlessly suicidal detective and a hell of a lot of winking. Admin2 is reading Dragon’s Green by Scarlett Thomas, an enchanting book in a luminous jacket.
Pink Sky at Night
Jun 2nd 2017
…and pink rainbow bright.
Admin1 is reading A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre.
Pagan Idol
May 28th 2017
Admin1′s pile of twigs for the binfire.
And our first circumzenithal arc for a while.
Admin2 is reading A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble; the social lives of the hifalutin chatterati in the fictitious Yorkshire city of Northam, accidentally unmasked as Sheffield.