Freezing Cold

For the past 5 days the temperature in Chamonix hasn't risen above -4°C. In fact it's dropped down to -15°C in the night sometimes. That's pretty nippy by any stretch!

I had to do some chores yesterday and needed to dig Merv out of the snow in the morning. 2 feet of snow all over the lad requiring moving. Unfortunately I misplaced my gloves the other day and was in a bit of a hurry so rather than getting some snowboarding gloves, figured just to dig him out with the tools at hand. Bad mojo. I think I got a bit of frostnip in my right hand - after 4 tries of digging away the snow with a broken ice-hockey stick and a scraper the size of a fingernail he was free. A couple of weeks ago he would have been stuck solid but his new snow tires gripped as they should and he was released onto the freedom of the road.

After doing my bits and bobs, I decided to get a new pair of gloves from town and spent a few minutes checking out the vast array of winter handwear in the various shops. I love France and the French have a differing style but there's some seriously hideous fashionistas that obviously choose the clothes for some of the shops here. I actually found a pair of woolen leopard-print gloves, some black leather gloves of the type frequently appearing as part of serial-killer garb on CSI, rubberised (WTF?!) winter gloves for the more deviant man/woman about town. Of course there were some nicer options too. I went for a pair of black woolen fingerless gloves that are convertible to mittens with a fleece inner. Very warm and very funky.



I've got to dig Merv out again tonight to go down to Tinks'. Time to test them out.

Snow!

It's snowing! Wahey! Not heavily but there's flakes in the air and the snow line has dropped down to around 1600m. The boys and girls are getting increasingly animated and there's big love in the air due to the falling white goodness.



Mark from All Mountain Performance has just managed to get a new equipment deal from Völkl with skis, poles, bindings, boots, jackets, fleeces, trousers - for all his instructors too. It's a great deal with lots of goodies and so he's now got loads of unusable gear his previous sponsors. I'm going to take a pair of skis off his hands to use this season methinks.

New Lease of Life

Good solid day of work done today and finishing up now - about 10pm. Will come in tomorrow and bosh out a load more but really humming along with this project now. Churned out a load of good stuff earlier and going to try and complete loads of it this weekend ready to jump into next week with a big cheesy grin. Chris has chipped off back to the Fatherland to see family this weekend so going to try and cream through the work while he's away so he can come back to something cool.

Feeling loads better after a real low point mid-week. Going to try and get out for a run this weekend too - might even run from the farm to work tomorrow. I'm becoming more and more of a fan of being fit and healthy making a difference mentally. Hopefully in my case even watching sport has the same effect but who knows - I'm not a scientist.

After the 24 festival that occurred when it was pissing it down with rain a few weekends ago, it looks like Sunday evening might promote a bit of a Lethal Weapon festival. Frankly the weather looks like it's going to be shocking. Saturday should be pretty nice though - I'll just slip on my green flash, skin-tight 1970's tennis shorts, headband and my ipod (it's at times like this I wish I had a cassette walkman) and go running around being generally healthy.

Oh! ... and it snowed this week! It's August for god's sake! There was a serious drop in temperature (one that made the log pile deplete in size) and it dumped above 1800m. Go figure - the weather here is weirder than a bucket of soapy frogs sometimes.

Dealing with the demons

Feeling pretty low today. Got lots on my mind.

Crampons has decided to use my place at the farm as accommodation for staff over the winter season. We had agreed that I'd stay there with Chris over the winter but hey, things change and it's not a surprise - it's something we've talked about several times over the past few months. It's no bad thing really - I love it up there but some pretty big problems were looming up on the horizon with regards to the winter. Heating and transport and internet access being the three main ones.

Ironically the weather's turned over the past 24 hours, the recent days of blue skies and baking sun have been replaced with the Jurassic Park look. Thunderstorms broke up the peace of the night and this morning misty cloud was rising from the woods on each side of the valley. The cloud is hanging low and heavy over Chamonix and Les Houches has taken on a darker hue.

Work's going well however but some seriously long days are needed before the end of the week to meet the first deadline. We're cracking on with it now and dropping it into the main development environment with several degrees of success.

I know in my mind that things are going to be good - the card deck is shuffled. Time to deal a hand and see what happens.

Doing the dev

My brain's fried. Proper fried. Was up til 4am trying to pull apart a 56MB MySQL database dump file on 3 different operating systems. Turns out that a combination of shell scripts, Red Hat Linux and nano text editor is the best combination for splitting the file up.



Mailed it into work and retired gracefully to bed ready for loading it into a database this morning. Turns out the data's corrupt in it and so Chris and I have been trying to sift and clean it this morning. Bah!

All this energy on geekiness is because of the contract which we've started recently. We're having to create a full mirrored dev environment from the production servers in the states to be able to work from here effectively. It needs to be done but my word it's really mentally fatiguing. The good news is that it only needs to be set up once - then it's just the fun part of development - building new things, making them work properly and making it look pretty. The bad news is that the rain and storms of late are no longer with us and there's blue skies and bright sunshine. I really want to get out and do some exercise and be in the fresh air but alas - have to prioritise.

Chris has chipped off to a music festival near Geneva this afternoon and after bashing my brains against the computer for another couple of hours, think I might knock work on the head, grab Digby the Dog and my iPod and go for a run up into the thinner air.

P.S. Had refried beans last night - went for mexican food around Brian's with two of his friends travelling around Europe who dropped in to Cham. Was very cool. My dad's given me a penchant for refried beans over the years and these ones imported via Switzerland were very good indeed. Happy days!

Rain over Chamonix

Still raining! Mont Blanc is hidden by cloud when looking from the office. Thinking to finish up here and head home for a bit in a few minutes and see what's happening in the Delice in Les Houches before tootling off home for a spot of dinner. There's a few rumbles of thunder in the heavens too - might even get a evening show of electricity over the evening meal.

Raining over the Bossons Glacier


More rain up on the Aiguille du Midi (peak far right) and the Mont Blanc Massif.

Stormy nights and peaceful sleep

It's 12.38am and I've been unable to sleep because of the continual thunder echoing up and down the valley and the arced flashes of lighting shattering the dark of the night. But I'm not unhappy, far from it.

I've been feeling good for a while now and better still in the recent past. Things are truly going well and I have no real worries - the future looks extremely positive, the present is solid and happy and the past is history and reflection. I can lay my head down at night these days without the shadows of doubt and negative thought shouting through my mind and I can sleep - albeit when the weather decides to calm down! But even if it doesn't, I know tomorrow I will still wake up looking forward to the day.

I'm going to pull the sofa in front of the computer and get my duvet and a pillow and crash out watching Die Hard. Hopefully the thunder outside will fit nicely into watching Bruce sparking cliches out and shooting terrorists.

Where's the summer gone?

So it's been raining for the past couple of days. The forecast is that it's going to rain cats and dogs for the next two. Bah. I thought this was supposed to be summer!

Things I've done in the past 3 days:

1) Went climbing to Gaillands with Chris and did a multipitch to the very top of the Forestier crag. We had an adventure around the woods on the top of the cliffs then abseiled down a chimney after doing a rather cool little traverse on a rock knife edge ridge.
2) Went out for a beer into Cham with Chris and met up with Brian (just returning from spending the past couple of days climbing enormous routes high up in the mountains) and Emma and had an MBC burger.
3) Been strimming the grass and undergrowth around the farmhouse to make it look pretty and nice.
4) Worked from home.
5) Looked at clouds being pushed around the valley below.
6) Listened to the rain fall (a lot) and gotten woken up by storms regularly.

Standard stuff really - nothing terribly exciting to report unfortunately but next week looks awesome for the weather. Looking forward to getting out for a bit of monkey activity on the rock and this period of inactivity is pretty cool for going for runs in the breaks in the weather and letting the fingers and hands and rest of body heal up from small dinks and bruises.

What the heck?!

Woke up this morning to Wardo knocking on my bedroom door telling me to look outside. Duly rolled over and glanced out from my balcony and falling endlessly from the skies above - huge flakes of snow! And it's nearly June! So it's dumped down massively and everything looks Chrismassy again. Very pretty.


The balcony this morning


We knew there was a bit of snow forecast but it's dropped several inches of the white stuff last night between coming home from dinner at Caroline's (wicked tartiflette and apple pie - thanks Caroline!) and carrying on until around 2pm this afternoon. It's just started up again a bit now and there's more on the way. At this rate it's not going to be long before we get fully snowed in up on our snowy perch in the mountains.


The views from the farm




This screwing up global weather thing is really obvious up here in the mountains. We really need to get our act together and do something about it. Not the small steps some people are currently taking but large sweeping reforms to try to get the planet back on track.

On a totally different tack Zinzan Brooke, the ex All-Black suffered a head injury falling from a taxi and is in for brain surgery. He was a favourite player of mine in the 90's and I hope he gets better soon.

On another different tack, I found a lizard shivering in our pile of wood whilst stocking up this morning ready for this cold spell and so I brought him in and he's now living in a biscuit tin with some leaves and stones in our lounge. I'll let him go when it heats up a bit outside.

Liz the Lizard in the biscuit tin.

Thunderstorm and a log fire

A summer thunderstorm came rolling into our end of the valley just after I'd lit the log fire a few minutes ago. A few deep peals of thunder complimented by the staccato crackling of the burning wood. Nature's own symphony and very cool.

We get lots of thunderstorms here because of the sun heating the rocky mountains during the day. I'm really looking forward to the summer and all the extreme weather it's going to bring.

Empty Ferme and the FA Cup

Andy's gone back to Blighty this weekend, Crampons is out in the Med somewhere and so I'm all alone at home looking after the dogs. Luckily the weather's really brightened up so tis beautiful. This along with the snow of last week (when it was raining heavily it was snowing on the upper reaches of the mountains) is making the valley look really cool. I've got the doors and windows open and Dirty Harry by Gorillaz pumping out filling our little corner of the Alps with music.

Yesterday I was planning on watching the FA Cup final downstairs on Crampon's sky box but got a call from Christophe asking if I fancied going down to Vaudagne to watch the match down there with him. He's house and dog sitting for Corin and Claire while they're back in the UK. We ended up having a couple of beers watching the footy and then taking the dogs out for just the most incredible walk up into the upper meadows and a staggeringly beautiful little hamlet of old chalets high up. Total knickerdropper walk. I got a shout from Hannah (my Czech companion) who's coming back out this summer to see me and live out here a bit longer. We'll definitely be going up there walking through the woods up to the hamlet and the meadows with the best views I've seen in the valley. Totally cool.

So today it's a tidy-up day. Have done the kitchen, brought in some logs and I'll hoover and clean the living room. Andy's back tomorrow evening so I'll chip up to Geneva and pick him up and return to a nice clean house.

I've even downloaded season 3 of Top Gear to watch this evening along with dinner. Funky Sunday!

Proof

I wasn't kidding yesterday about the weather raining and raining. I don't mind though, got lots of work to do.

Layered cloud outside the office.

Still raining!

Had a quick look at the weather forecast today on Cham valley and I've got to say, it's not terribly inspiring for outdoor pursuits. I don't mind at all - I've got loads of work to do, but it feels a bit claustrophobic in the valley with dense cloud half-way up the mountains above and the thick green vegetation growing up on each side. It feels a bit like living in the Eden Project!

The weather report:


Even the Arve river's got a brown tinge to it as the water endlessly runs off the mountain. The valley has it's own very unique weather patterns governed by the high peaks all around, and I've been reading quite a bit about meteorological conditions in mountains so I'm more informed for climbing, backcountry snowboarding, hiking or really in case anything should go wrong. Plus it's interesting. I've experienced many Föhn winds over the past months and seen some really whacky lenticular clouds around the various mountains but especially Mont Blanc.

Anyways back to work. Got SQL to write.

First few days in Cham

Everything seems to be coming together nicely. Am riding the Grands Montets today - one of the mountains in the valley. Low cloud cover so probably going to take a few hits getting up to full speed. Never mind, no pain no gain.

There's a reasonable amount of snow to contend with, but it really could do with a heavy dump. Luckily the taste of snow is in the air and the temperature's dropped. One of the great things about being here full time is being able to make a judgement call each morning whether or not to go up on the mountain. If it's really crap then there's always tomorrow. It doesn't really matter at the moment, so revved up about being here that Narg would ride in a whiteout blizzard.