Weekend Update

Friday was snowy too in Wycombe, we didn't bother leaving for the nursery & work until after 10am to allow the gritters to do their work in Wycombe so traffic could get up the hill to get out of town. The nursery closed at 1pm, so Lara was only there briefly, but that's better than nothing. She is suffering with another cold at the moment, she had a restless night on Friday (poor Olga had to stay up with her while I was out on a boys night in Reading!). She's been quiet and basically under-the-weather all weekend, and she slept in the backpack for most of today's walk around snowy West Wycombe. It hasn't snowed since Friday morning, but it's not melting quickly here, as you can see from this afternoon's photographs. In fact this evening it's started snowing properly again, so travel plans will probably be messed up again tomorrow.

Russian Snow

Just to show that it's not just us who is having some snow issues here in the UK, here are some photos of Olga's mum outside her apartment block taken recently by her neighbour.
Apparently the word on the street is that this year there isn't so much snow! However, it will stay until April, and the roads aren't gritted as everyone has winter tyres an drives sensibly...
Thanks to Sergei for taking the photos, and to Baba Luda for showing the true scale of those nice Christmas trees!
Luda's home town is on the eastern lower slopes of the Ural Mountains, a three-hour drive north of Yekaterinburg.

Time isn't wasted

We might be "working from home" (and indeed I did just a fix a problem in the States from here) but that doesn't mean there's no time to play in the garden. Meet Mr Frosty for example:

And of course, there's Miss Frosty:

I found a seed tray the doubled as a perfect sledge for Lara, and she seemed to enjoy her first go at sledging:

It might have only been for 2 metres but we all had to start somewhere, and she didn't fall over (not at least while I filmed ;-) )

Not this morning, thank you

I waited and I saw... cars queuing and sliding everywhere. Is our journey this morning absolutely necessary? Nope. So for now at least we're staying put, Lara will have her porridge then put her snow suit on and we'll be off to the back garden. For now she's enjoying watching the cars struggle past the front of the house, from Mishka's normal observation point:

Just for the bigger picture, here's the current view from our window across High Wycombe:

Right again

Well, we've had 3" of snow overnight. It didn't look promising yesterday evening, there wasn't a flake in the air, and the reports on the news were suggesting that the South East wouldn't get very much after all. However, there's enough this morning to make driving interesting, for Olga to decide against going to London (in case her clients can't make it in - they didn't on Monday!), and for Arriva buses to suspend their services from Wycombe. Lucy came over yesterday afternoon to collect her passport, which had been delivered to us, with her extended visa (phew!). However, now that means it'll be tricky to get her back to Reading this morning for her college course.
We're assuming Lara's nursery will be open - it was on Monday - but local radio reckons that my normal route there resembles the Dancing on Ice skating rink.
We'll wait and see......