Quiet day

Only one of yesterday's Bramblings remained and I didn't get out much as medium westerly with strong gusts when the rain squalls came through made it unpleasant a.m. By the afternoon things had quietend down a bit and I was outside for much of the afternoon but doing garden jobs. Bird of the day was the male Hen Harrier which repeated yesterday's trick of hunting the feeders and appearing just outside the kitchen window.

The weather is winding itself up for another blast with gusts of 60mph forecast for tomorrow, 30ft + seas early Tuesday a.m. Last Wednesday's gale blew four of the scaffolding planks off the scaffolding currently on the east end of our house, as chimney and roof repairs are in progress. Glad I wasn't underneath, also glad the wind wasn't blowing the other way - bye, bye conservatory...

Rookery, the 80 nests are now rather reduced

The familiar green garage doors are no more, they nearly blew away Christmas Day 2011 but survived the storm. They didn't survive the attentions of Window Craft however, kitchen now considerably warmer.

Doors and scaffolding

Space weather info... SUNSPOT OF INTEREST: A break in the quiet could be in the offing. Sunspot AR1667 is crackling with C-class solar flares and appears capable of producing an even stronger M-class eruption. The sunspot is turning toward Earth, so future blasts would likely be geoeffective. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.

LOUD SOLAR RADIO BURST: Yesterday, Feb. 2nd, the solar activity forecast called for "quiet." In fact, says amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft, "it was really loud. There were several strong solar radio emissions including one super-strong Type III burst at 1954 UT. I captured it at 28 MHz and 21.1 MHz as it totally drowned out a short wave voice transmission."