Spooky Weather

It's Halloween, and here Nature is up to some spooky tricks of its own tonight - like moving/turning over dust-bins on wheels outdoors, and rattling the balconies on my building, making scary noises. And most likely worse, elsewhere...!

Earlier in the afternoon, as I was sitting in my chair in the living room, watching TV, there was some sudden very unusual kind of noise from outside, which made me jump up and look out of my windows. This was the sight that met me:

Photo taken from my balcony door. That bench has its normal place against the wall below the window to the left of that door... Now a gust of wind from the west had lifted it up and  blown it across the balcony floor, banging into the railing in the opposite corner! (I've lived here 16 years, the bench has always been in the same place, all year round, and this has never happened before...)

Checking the weather app on my phone I saw that warnings for strong gusts of wind had been issued for tonight and a day or two onward, with recommendations to secure things like garden furniture etc outdoors. So I ended up taking the bench inside, and the box of strawberry plants still hanging on the railing as well. Normally the box of strawberries hibernates all winter under the bench. I think what caused the situation now was probably that so far this autumn I had just covered the top of the bench provisionally (obviously just making it more tempting for the wind to play with, rather than serving as protection...)

I think I'll have to await a calmer day to decide if I can recreate my usual winter arrangement or if I'd better just take the bench down to the basement storage room this year. (There are some problems with that as well, though.)

While dealing with this rather minor "incident", inside my head I had images from all the recent much worse weather situations around the world: The hurricanes in Florida, where I have at least one blogging friend (Sandra) still dealing with the aftermaths. The flooding in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where other friends had their house severly flooded. They lost most of their furniture and other belongings. Similar situations now on the east coast of Spain, from what I've seen on TV. And via Facebook I've learned that "Typhoon Kong-rey, the biggest typhoon to directly hit Taiwan in nearly 30 years, has made landfall on the island's eastern coast" (where I also have friends living).

Here, I still have power, so am going to turn my TV on now and check what of all this (and more) that's currently considered worth mentioning in my corner of the world.