Gerrit

When Dave and I first rented this cottage in July, we kept saying, "Wouldn't it be amazing to be here during a winter storm?" With the glass wall facing the ocean it would surely be a spectacle.

Well, yesterday I got to experience it. We had a named storm, Gerrit, which brought steady winds of 25-35 mph and gusts above 40 mph. The house rumbled and the ocean pounded and I stayed inside pretty much all day. We also had rain, though not as much as in some other parts of the country, where Gerrit caused flooding. The photo above shows Poseidon standing guard in the garden, seen through the rain on the window.

Here's what the weather looked like about 9:30 a.m. from the deck and then out on the beach:

You can see how rough the waves were compared to the video in yesterday's post. You'll also see Olga at the end, sensibly parked indoors on the couch. That's pretty much where we both spent the day. I only went out to the corner shop in the morning to get a few odds and ends for dinner. (Holly's collar is gone!)

Despite the storm, Dave set out for London and although he said his train was crowded with people returning from Christmas holidays, he got home fine. He took almost all our stuff, so I'm left with just a change of clothes, some toiletries and a book, and I'm happy about that. Dave tends to bring a lot when he travels, enjoying all the comforts of home, whereas I tend to feel oppressed by a lot of belongings that I need to keep track of. I feel a sense of relief knowing it's all back where it belongs.

I spent the day reading and last night I watched a documentary on Netflix called "Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire." It was about a disastrous 1979 amusement park fire in Sydney, Australia, that killed seven people, six of them children. I don't recall ever hearing of this incident, so it was all new to me, and the documentary was very skillful in its presentation -- what starts out seeming like a fairly pedestrian recounting of a terrible accident eventually turns into a sordid saga of political corruption reaching to the top of the New South Wales state government. I plowed through all three episodes in a single sitting and it was astonishing.

Dave and I watched a less satisfying film on Tuesday night -- "Saltburn," a gothic thriller set in an English country house. It was like "Brideshead Revisited" on cocaine, trying way too hard to be shocking. I didn't mind it as a two-hour diversion, but Dave was repulsed.