It was action stations here today with me getting up at 6:00 and getting some wood cut for indoors in preparation for tomorrow's wintery blast. Then the man rang about my friend's car and turned up soon afterward. Headed up to Jeans where he happily loaded the Skyline onto his trailer and went on his merry way while I stayed indoors with Jean and ate rock cakes and drank tea till it was all sorted.

Home once more and after walking the dogs I went to make a cup of tea. No water. Went outside and the lights were all out on the pump. It was positively crawling with harlequin beetles so I thought they had damaged it in some way. Oh no! Thinks me!! The pump has died. Checked the fuse box and discovered all the switches were in the right position, so went inside to call a friend who might know about pumps. No signal! It was only then I thought to check the status of electricity in the house and discovered we had a black out in progress.

The blackout lasted for some hours, but finally resumed service this afternoon so all is well at present.

Tomorrow they are forecasting the most extreme weather conditions possible (for the West Coast, the rest of us are just getting the usual severe weather warnings), with something called thundersnow which is apparently snow storms accompanied by lightning and thunder. Better them than me is all I can say. We, on the other hand, are only expecting snow to 500m which presumably means I will get some flurries of snow and sleet, but will otherwise just get rained upon.