It's been really hot recently.  Unseasonably.  And it's summer.  

For the last week we have had temperatures in the 30's.  That is something we normally only get once a year or so, and certainly not for any more than a day at a time.

I'm currently recuperating after an operating on my knee, so unable to do much to stay cool beside become one with the sofa while having all the windows open.

A couple of interesting things have happened.

1.   A new nighttime visitor in the garden.  

For the last few nights just as the sun goes down, there has been a Meep coming from the garden.  At first I thought we had a battery going flat in a smoke detector or something.  It sounds a lot like the beep you get when you are at the self scan in the supermarket.  It wasn't anything inside the house, so I thought it must have been a bird.  We get to hear a lot of interesting wildlife in the woods out the back of the house so I chalked it up to something like that.  

Two nights later and it is still meeping it's way in to the night.  So I turn to twitter to solve it:

Okay twitchers and nature lovers of twitter. What is this meep that is hounding me at night through the bedroom wind pic.twitter.com/xkKhUZnhni

— Phil Mercer-Kelly (@philmercer) August 13, 2020

The answer... A Midwife Toad.  Thanks to Mike.  He even sent me a link to a full briefing about it. Click here. 

2.  Storms

All that heat had to end at some point, and boy did it.  Last night was a glorious few hours of thunderstorm after thunderstorm.  It was spectacular and enough to stop all sleep.  I ended up having to get up to check and see if any of the rain was getting in.  It's wonderful to be in the middle of a storm like that, especially when you are safe in doors.  Still it's nothing compared to my memories of the 1987 storm though.  That was a real doozy.