I'm not going to apologise for what I'm about to say, but it is going to make me sound very opnionated and up my own rear end. But as I said, it's my opinion and it's all because of the rain...
As you probably know, today has been wet, very wet, thus has lead to many complaints on my Facebook feed about the weather, and the fact that people don't think we can be in a drought with all this rain.
To be quite honest, yes that seems logical, but also a basic knowledge of how the water table works, and some common logic that although there's been a lot of rain today it won't make up for 18 months, can tell you that it's easily not going to be enough for us to be automatically out of a drought. This kind of thinking bugged one of my pet hates. Ignorance.
In the occasional instances, yes ignorance is bliss, but not in day to day life. I don't intend to imply that I'm not ignorant about some things at all, and I think that is perfectly fine, but I do think that I have a good general knowledge, that will better with age and more life experience, but I know a lot of people my age, older and a bit younger that just have no idea about even the basics of common subjects. I feel that I would be able to hold a reletively intelligent conversation with someone about most common subjects, and some that aren't so well known, and even if I was clueless, I would be interested enough to at least listen to what someone had to say and to try and get an understanding for the topic in which they are talking about. I also thought that that was the normal way to approach things, but the more I look at the world and the people around me, the more I see that that seems to be dying out.
It's also very common in the subject of 'Current Affairs', so many people wouldn't have a clue what the top new stories of the week so far had been, but they do that every week, completely ignoring newspapers, radio, television and interenet news. A lot of people of my generation take pride in the fact that they don't really care about what's going on around them, surely that cannot be a recommended way to live your life? This may well contribute to some of the worlds problems, a lack of basic understanding as to what is going on around you. It upsets me to see that this way of thinking is becoming the norm when news and information on every subject you could wish to know about is now easier to come across than ever.
Hrumph, sorry, it's been bugging me all day. Rant over.
Rain. Well, today has been soggy to say the least. It's welcome in my opinion, even if it does make things look miserable. To get a good crop this year we need rain like this to continue for at least a month and I for one would be glad of natures help to stop food prices rocketing (as long as the farmers aren't being cheated).
It did mean that my first day of Student Ambassadoring for my University was pretty soggy. The main part of my job was taking people on a campus tour. Luckily my group was small so it was easier to walk and talk instead of standing at each place in the rain, but we still all got dutifully soaked. The free lunch, wages and cake did make up for it a bit though.
One of the Engineer boys was also working today, which was nice, as it meant I knew someone there, and had someone to ask silly questions as it was my first time. Since he was already back in his house (his 'car' is a Defender, so he came back early, too expensive to go back home only to come back at the weekend, even if his car can run on vegetable oil costing less than £1 a bottle from the Supermarket!) we decided to grab something for dinner from the co-op, and we spent the evening at his, having a bit of a catch up.
I then made the journey home, which was alright, again apart from the rain being an inconveniance. This morning had been a bit slow, the rain was fairly hard, but by that time there wasn't too much surface water and people could have been safely travelling faster than they were. This evening though, a whole days worth more of surface water, and a load of people driving like morons in the dark.
I spent most of the journey travelling on Country Roads (single carriage A roads and a couple of B's towards the end, but neither of those are single track and only a section has no markings in the middle) averaging somewhere between 50 and 60 in the sections that were national, dependant on the puddles and the road layout. This was a safe speed as far as I was concerned, but I wouldn't have gone any faster. There were people going in the other direction and over taking me at ridiculous speeds, hitting large puddles at frightening speeds and one guy nearly crashed his Jag as he went past me aqua-planing.
I did have my own little episode on one of the B roads though. I was coming down a hill (aka slope at which water usually gathers at the bottom, although I didn't think of this) at just under 40 mph and even with beam on couldn't see the BLOODY HUGE PUDDLE all the way across the road until the last second, I braked heavily and hit the water pretty fast, it was a bit scary, but I kept the car under control and was just glad there was no one there to see me!
In other news, I Emailed all of the National Parks the other day, to see if any of them had any possibilities of placement, and I've had a few fairly positive sounding responses today, so I will keep you posted in due course.
Ta-ra a bit!
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