Kyrill pays us a visit

Okay, last week we finally had some winter weather. Sort of. As some of you may have read, the windstorm "Kyrill" roared through Western Europe, bringing near hurricane winds and heavy rain to England, Germany, Poland, and the surrounding countries. In our province (Bavaria), the winds reached 200 km/h, toppling trees and tearing shingles off of roofs. And flipping some trucks. School and businesses closed early on Thursday, to give everyone a chance to get home before the full fury of the storm arrived (expected around 7:00). Later that evening, the government decided to suspend all school in the entire province on Friday, because the large amounts of trees on the road and the difficulties in getting anywhere by road. Thursday evening and night until 5 in the morning the winds howled around us. They managed to topple two trees on our property, one of them in the picture below, and also a pine tree at the back of the Pabst property.





Our roof held, and we didn't loose one shingle (most roofs here are composed of those heavy, clay-like, thick shingles that come off in high winds), but the wind managed to punch out a large hole in the roof of one of the farm buildings. Sorry, I don't have a picture of that. The wind toppled so many trees onto railroad tracks that most of the German train system was down Friday, and some routes remained out of commission until Sunday.
The problem was, the wind was warm. About 12 degrees in our area, and up to 20 degrees in another part of Germany. We also didn't get that much rain, and certainly no snow. We haven't even had snow yet this winter.

HOW LAME IS THAT?

It's not that I really care how much it snows here, as there are no ski hills nearby anyway, but a bit of winter would be nice too. And of all the years that I'm not in Vancouver for the ski season, it turns out to be a superb one!

Now that's lame.

On the other hand, I just went for a nice, long run yesterday through the countryside with only shorts and t-shirt. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Even saw some deer in the forest that I ran through. The problem was, the sun started to set on my way home, and it got chilly pretty fast. I hope that I didn't catch a cold, though I'm afraid I may have. I'm not feeling totally up to snuff today...