Friday, January 19, 2007

A Mighty Wind

Well it was the windiest I have ever seen or experienced here yesterday. We woke up yesterday and you could just hear the wind howling. It got progressively worse. The house just groaned all day long and the windows rattled loudly. I was seriously concerned about the windows breaking. By midmorning, I was steering clear of all the windows in our house. Rightly so. I don't think our built sometime near 1815 house was meant to withstand this kind of wind. I saw on the news later that the winds had reached 99 mph and that Lords Cricket Ground, about 1 block from our house, had suffered damage. Apparently parts of the roof had blown off and damaged cars parked nearby and injured 2 pedestrians. Yikes! Transportation was all screwed up, tube lines stopped, flights in and out of Heathrow delayed. Condoleezza Rice was to visit London yesterday and her flight circled Heathrow for 15 minutes until the winds died down to 77 mph so she could land. That still sounds fairly windy to me!! I knew the kids had acclimated to Britain when they told the story of the disruption of their walking home route by a huge tree that had fallen across a pretty major road. The police were diverting traffic and Kiki said they made them walk down a pretty "sketchy" alleyway!

To make matters worse, yesterday was garbage day. We get these small plastic bins for our recylcing items and the wind just blew these around like paper airplanes. I watched them blow through the air from my upstairs window. I would have only been mildly surprised if I had seen an old hag riding her bicylce in the air with a small dog in her front basket. It was just that windy.

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