Summer Scenes, June Jobs, Cold Front, FYROM

Sights and sounds of the countryside in summer: the combine-harvesters crashing and threshing, their strong lights beaming into the late night as operations continue while weather allows. That means I have a wonderful excuse for further delay on ‘spring’ cleaning – that dust has to settle first. :)

After wet, warm weather, the fragrant night-flower plants have really taken over the rose-bed – as has the wild garlic, whose purple pom-pom blooms I’m loath to uproot.  Incidentally, I call them night-flowers – from the Greek nychtoloulouda  - but they are known as Mirabilis Jalapa, The Marvel of Peru, or  ‘The Four o’Clock Flower’- which sounds awfully English and tea-time-ish, don’t you think?

             

                                          

Then there is this green sludge that has accumulated in the swimming pool - no one would consider doing the butterfly in that! But Z has decided that the nearby trees, whose needles keep dropping into the pool, have to lose some branches.

                        

 

Though we pool our resources, :) , he is definitely the hero of the day, having perilously scaled, lopped and chopped. The marathon clean commences: brushing down, hosing out, power pressure washing, chlorine brushing, followed by a final hosing rinse – it all takes time. Then the glorious moment arrives: the plug is put in place, swilling pumps switched off, and the big hose now starts pumping to fill the pool – yay! Summer’s here!

              

 

But, as they say in Edinburgh, we were a bit too previous! What follows is a meteorological mess.   The National Geographic Society tells us: 

A front is a weather system that is the boundary separating two different types of air. One type of air is usually denser than the other, with different temperatures and different levels of humidity. This clashing of air types causes weather: rain, snow, cold days, hot days, and windy days.
Two major types of fronts are cold fronts and warm fronts.
Cold fronts often come with thunderstorms or other types of extreme weather.

Strong, powerful cold fronts often take over warm air that might be nearly motionless in the atmosphere. Cold, dense air squeezes its way through the warmer, less-dense air, and lifts the warm air. Because air is lifted instead of being pressed down, the movement of a cold front through a warm front is usually called a low-pressure system. Low-pressure systems often cause severe rainfall or thunderstorms.

Well, that’s what we got for two whole weeks: a cold front, low-pressure system - a really depressing front. And our pool remains non-baptised!

     

 

 Here you can perhaps even see the heavy hail falling.  Fortunately, the farmers managed to cut, bail and cover their crops before they got soaked.  And we managed to pick our first cucumbers before they got bruised and pitted by the hailstones.

      

 

Our magnolia’s grande flora blooms never last long but in such damp conditions their fragile flowers fade rapidly.

                         

We currently have a cold, high pressure, front in the political system: the name forwarded for FYROM is ‘The Republic of North Macedonia’.

 A friend has suggested it undergo a minor systemic change to ‘The Republic north of Macedonia’.  

That’s why there should be an Applied Linguist at every negotiating table!