Our internet connection failed sometime Saturday night. It was the culmination of a week-long community event, with lashings of rain turning this plateau into a swamp.
All that water eventually moved down toward the river, leaving behind drowned server boxes (or whatever they’re called, those boxes dotting the landscape here and there, some of which can be seen from the road). Whatever genius designed this beta model of internet via phone lines planted those boxes smack dab on the ground, thus ensuring heavy rain would drown them. At least that’s what we suspect.
So we can keep our phone service during heavy rains… but the internet goes down in the deluge.
“How much water?” you ask. About five inches in the course of two days or so. But before that, it had been raining steadily for a week so; by Friday the runoff was impeded by the previous soaking. That box just drowned for a while.
[Due to some other glitch, we were without phone service for five days last week…yes, we’re a captive audience out here, ain’t no competition to improve this system. Satellite internet is too unreliable and expensive. The electric cooperative is working on a version that would come through their wires, but what with lines failing due to snow accumulation or trees falling on them, they go out of service right much during the winter, so probably not.]
We did try to have someone log on here and leave a notice, but our proxy firewall prevented their access. And also prevented the bad guys from using us for target practice while we were outside in our wellies, measuring the rainfall.
Anyway, we’re baaack! The sun is shining as though that grey wet week never happened.
Thanks for your patience, dear readers.
And we had snow last week. But not much. Summer this year in the north of Russia is little snow
Sheesh! So what do you plant in your garden other than snow peas? Siberian irises, perhaps…?
Do you actually have anything approaching a last frost date?? Ours is May 15th, but in some years I’ve seen it go past that. Not much to worry about, though, since all the fruit trees have flowered by then and set their fruit.
I live in a city apartment. To keep a holiday plot is a very expensive hobby and it takes a lot of time with low returns. Without problems, only root crops grow. But some amateurs of agriculture create real miracles in their greenhouses. Of fruit, only apple (northern varieties) fructifies, garden berries grow beautifully. In the garden of my grandmother in the Crimea berry bushes fructified much worse.
But here there are many forests where you can pick blueberries, cowberries and mushrooms. Cranberries grow a little to the north.
Winter is very long. My schnauzer joyfully runs through snowdrifts and shares with me optimism, without a dog, winter would be unbearable.
If your apartment has a balcony, consider using a straw bale to grow summer vegetables. Might not work if your balcony faces north but otherwise, you can grow a great variety of, say, leafy greens…
http://www.urbangardensweb.com/2013/07/11/french-straw-bale-garden-grows-crops-and-flowers-on-urban-balcony/
Strawberries like them, too, as do peas. Look on YouTube for “urban straw bales” for even more ideas.
Much relieved to hear it. There are some advantages to living in the Big City (London, in my case), at least until it all goes pear-shaped!
Yes, Mark H: enjoy it while you can…not much anyone can do about now.
Hi Mark, I came over in December/January and apart from a week in Portsmouth, we stayed with friends in Walton on Thames and Kanya helped out in their Thai restaurant. I did go into Putney one day to have lunch with friends but, in view of a surfeit of culture enrichment elsewhere, we decided to give Central London a miss. The enrichers are behaving more like invaders and the so-called agencies of law and order appear to be stood down allowing them free reign.
Hello Peter, Sorry you found the place so intimidating; maybe it seems worse when you don’t live here? The centre is ok apart from the occasional terrorist attack (!), but they are very rare; my lady and I often meet there. Paris has had worse, but we’d not hesitate to revisit; it’s a cliche, I know, but that would be giving in.