The Blustery Day

The wind is getting up, it has been intensifying as the morning as the day has gone on. It roars, and rattles the window, which has never rattled before. Why now I wonder?

I set off on my daily walk this morning in full dress. I wore a toque, a parka and gloves. I was comfortable. The wind was strong enough to push me along when it was behind me, and shove at me when it was coming at me. I didn’t mind though, because it was lovely to be outside! The grass is beginning to green. There are buds on some of the trees. The snow is gone!

The trees were waving madly at the roaring wind, pick me, pick me! Ever mindful of falling branches, I walked on the wrong side of the road to avoid passing under dead branches. Of course, even live branches blow down on days as windy as this one, but dead ones are more likely to succumb to gravity in high wind.

I don’t think they teach children how to walk along the roadsides anymore. I see so many joggers and walkers under 40, tooling along with the traffic at their back. That is such a dangerous practise! We walked along high speed highways to school when I was a kid, and we learned this poem when we first went to primary school: “Single file, Indian style, facing traffic, all the while”. It is a simple concept, walking or running or cycling towards oncoming traffic so you can see what is going on with those fast moving behemoths that could kill you instantly. To me it seems a no brainer, but to over 80% of the people I see out on the roads walking, running, or cycling, don’t seem to understand the concept. I just can’t believe they are as suicidal as they appear to me to be.

This particular issue has personal importance to me, as my eleven year old cousin was riding a bicycle along the highway, traffic at his back, when he veered slightly, and was hit and killed by a passing car. It was a tragic accident, scarring his parents, his siblings, his relatives, and the poor young woman who had the misfortune to be driving by when he veered out into the road. Had he been facing traffic he would have known that a vehicle was approaching, and might have moved out of the way.

I have been sequestered at the kitchen table for days and days. Google, in their wisdom, decided that web sites must be designed for mobiles, to be picked up by the search engine. Good grief!!! Two of my sites fell below that standard. Not this one of course, it was updated this past winter. But the other two were a much, much bigger job! They were developed in html, and would not easily adapt to mobile viewing. There was nothing for it but to redesign them from the ground up. That was time consuming enough, BUT the real challenge was the more than 400 pages in each site that had to be manually recreated for the mobile ready site, and then all the original pages had to be recorded and redirected to the new mobile pages.

The deadline is tomorrow. I did despair that I would ever get those two sites ready in time. For the last three or four nights I have dreamt about php code, server redirects, and file structures. At about 3:15 p.m. this afternoon, I dotted the last i, and crossed the last t, so to speak, and the second site “went live” with a little glitch and hitch to fix here and there.

I checked to see if google was picking up the redirects, and yes, success, google automatically takes visitors to the new pages!

I am exhausted! I am also feeling very satisfied with myself. I shouldn’t really feel this way, because I left this to the last minute. Ages ago google let everyone know this was coming, I was oblivious. Procrastination seldom pays off for me! I got it done in time!

Worldly Distractions

Weather

Little House in the City
10°C
Date: 3:00 PM EDT Monday 20 April 2015
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 100.1 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 10.2°C
Dewpoint: 7.6°C
Humidity:84%
Wind: SE 19 gust 45 km/h

Country House
6°C
Date: 6:46 AM EDT Monday 20 April 2015
Condition: Rain
Pressure: 100.0 kPa
Visibility: 5 km
Temperature: 6.1°C
Dewpoint: 5.3°C
Humidity: 94%
Wind: ESE 48 gust 71 km/h

Quote

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”
Mother Teresa
1910 – 1997

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Bex Crowell

Kind of a blustery wet rainy day here, so much so that the Red Sox game got to 7 innings and had to be rain-delayed… so much so that they never resumed it! “Game called on account of rain” as they say, and lucky for us, we were ahead of Baltimore 7-1. So they won 2 games and we won 2 games over the weekend. Not exactly stellar but we’ll take it.

TopsyTurvy (Teri)

We’ve had a blustery day here, too. And the temp has been climbing all afternoon. DH noticed a little while ago that it had made it up to 17C, about 63F.

I went and walked the dogs with DH this evening, it was no picnic. The pollen is getting strong and I was having difficulty breathing. I’d tired out only half way through the walk because I could barely breath. Until the spring pollen goes, I need to start taking my decongestants before walking.

Hmmmm. I wonder what’s happened to my website on Google? How can you tell if a site is okay, Maggie?

I expect to upgrade to my new site before the end of the week, and fortunately the site made on weebly does let you check to see how it looks on mobile.

NORA

Hi Maggie,
You lost me with “Google designed for mobile”. All of it sounded like a lot of work! Congrats on getting it all completed and working. Kudos to you!!!!!

The windows rattling…I have a theory. “Maybe” it has something to do with the construction going on across the street and the vibrations channeling through the ground. Perhaps those steady vibrations have shifted the foundation of the house ever so slightly but enough to make the windows rattle?

The grass is greening, the snow is gone and the sun was out! Yay! Glad that you are observant and on the look out for weakened branches. I do the same. In fact now I don’t even go out in the wind. I enjoy it from the patio.

I am so, so, so sorry about your dear cousin. Oh, Maggie what a shame. What a terrible shame. I hope the family can manage to get through this numbing experience. x0x0x0x

TopsyTurvy (Teri)

Oh, Nora’s post reminded me of other things I was going to comment on.

With the windows, could be the caulking is starting to dry and crumble. Or the window is just getting hit direct when it usually doesn’t. We had the latter happen here, last night. We were getting a direct East wind and it was making the front window rattle.

Sorry to hear about your cousin. One of SS29’s friends was killed last year because he was walking on a dark country highway after dark, walking with traffic. If he’d been facing traffic he would have seen the truck that hit him and gotten out of the way of the mirror that he was hit with.

I don’t know why they don’t seem to be teaching the facing traffic rule nowadays but I used that unfortunate accident to put a bug in everyone’s ear about walking facing traffic.

TopsyTurvy (Teri)

Oh, and sadly the young man that was hit was also wearing black – walking along the highway in the dark.

The young man’s family and friends wanted the driver to be prosecuted and just about strung up by his thumbs but they ruled a no-fault true accident, which I can understand even while I understand the family and friends wanting more.

TopsyTurvy (Teri)

Maggie, I did try to convey the inappropriateness of vengeance to the young people. I’m not so sure they listened, though atleast they never took action on their feelings.

I like the way your aunt and uncle handled things. I like to think I would have done the same in those circumstances.

Thank you for the links.