Under The Weather

A room with a view (of snow and rain and general bleakness).

There are days when Prague forces you to ask yourself a fundamental question. Why have you chosen to live in a place where the weather is so often dark and cold and wet and depressing?

Every day of the past 10 has been one of those days. And it's playing hell with my cycling. Not to mention my psyche. Psychling?

This morning, we awoke to find it snowing. Snowing pretty hard, actually. Then it started raining. And then it stopped raining. I decided to suit up and go for a ride during the break in the weather. I haven't been out since my ride in Florida. But by the time I'd pulled on all my cold-weather gear, it had started to rain again.

I don't mind riding in the cold, but I'm not insane enough to begin my ride in a downpour.

I don't have time to ride before work during the week, what with getting Emma ready for school and driving her there. And by the time I get out of work, it's pitch black outside.

So here I sit on a lazy Sunday, looking out the window of my house in Černý Vůl, at the coal smoke curling out of nearby chimneys; at the magpies, tits, nuthatches, collared doves, and jays visiting the feeder; at the pine branches bobbing in the wind; at the concrete-colored clouds hanging so low they seem to brush the treetops; and at the rain. Always the rain.

There will be no riding today.

Out Of Africa

I always marvel at the reach enjoyed by even the most humble of blogs. Through statcounter.com, I've been able to see that I have readers in such far-flung outposts as Iceland and Iran, Indonesia and Australia, Uruguay and Hawaii and China and South Africa and dozens of other countries and territories around the globe.

I have been mystified by the location of one fairly regular reader of the blog, though. He or she shows up on the statcounter map as a point in the Atlantic west coast of Africa, just off the Nigerian coast (see map below). But there's no country or island listed with the statcounter information.

The person is either reading my blog from a remote island or perhaps from one of the oil rigs dotting the waters in that area. Fascinating.

If you know anything more about what chunk of land or steel this location might be, drop me a line. Better yet, if you're the reader in question, I'd love to hear from you!