Er, I meant the metal grill and the tray bit for the charcoal, which will now no doubt lie there rusting until I remember to bring them in in about March, then get them out two weeks later when the sun comes out, and wonder why they’ve fallen to bits. 
No you don’t. I was working from home yesterday because the weather called for “a light wintery mix”. Instead we got about an inch or two of snow, with associated ice and freezing rain. The area was utterly unprepared for this.
I didn’t see the first snow plow until almost noon, and we lost power shortly after that. My husband attempted to leave work around then, as they had also lost power, and a tree was down across the drive and you could just barely squeak your car past. However, he called me a little bit later to tell me that he was trapped - his normal road home was blocked by another fallen tree, the secondary highway in the area was closed going in our direction, and the main highway was closed altogether. The only other road out goes over a mountain, and we agreed that it wasn’t even worth trying to see if it was open. All in all, it took him until almost 5:30 to get home.
In the meantime, I was unable to work (and had urgent stuff to do!) and was freezing, but was trapped at home by the road conditions. We spent a miserable night huddled in the living room with a bunch of blankets, candles, and dogs and cats, until the power finally came back at around 1:30 am this morning.
For the record, I’m about 50 miles or so northeast of Princeton.
For some reason I thought England was always cold and gloomy. This is unusual?
Yes. I can’t remember ever having snow in October (and like Illuminatiprimus I didn’t see any here on the SW extreme of London, although some of the cars heading out of town this morning had snow on them). Generally we get only a few days a year when it snows, usually just a light dusting if it settles at all. English winters are actually quite mild.
It always rains. We haven’t had proper snow for years. It only lasts a few days then gets washed away by rain :mad:
Yesterday I had to leave work at noon (in theory BT was coming to set up my phone line) and there were tiny white flakes falling off the sky…
Bloody snow. And bloody english drivers. :mad:
I had a blood test this morning, so my usual trip up the M3 was at 8:30am in sunshine and blue skies, not 6:30am. Nearing Basingstoke, traffic slowed to a crawl. An ambulance pushed up through the queue, so I figured it was an accident. 40 minutes later, and the snow was laying on the ground from the previous night, and I saw the accident - a car had skidded and flipped, on the other side of the motorway. Rubberneckers had slowed me down for 40 minutes, and I missed my breakfast bacon roll at work cause I was too late.
And I now have to fix our bedroom window hinges because it no longer closes properly and lets in all the cold air. 
Si (yes, I get grumpy if I miss my bacon roll, why do you ask)
We have a pretty temperate climate that doesn’t tend towards extremes. Parts of (inland) Northern England and Scotland can get quite cold and snowy in winter, but on the whole our winters are mild.
I’d say the more noticeable thing about English weather would be the speed at which it can change. It can be cold and gloomy, but we don’t really tend to get snow beyond an couple of inches or so, and certianly not in October. Rain, yes, snow no.
No, no, no. I don’t want winter. I want good old-fashioned English snow - the fluffy harmless stuff that just makes things look pretty.
It’s not just inland – I’m at the mouth of the Tyne, and we’re more likely to get snow than not, at least sometime during winter. I think four of our last ten Christmasses have been white.
Having said that, snow in October would still be early, even here. We haven’t had any (yet) but it certainly feels cold enough.
It’s forecast to be 76°F in Denver, CO today. 24°C. Same for the rest of the week.
Snowing nearby in the Black Forest. No snow a bit eastward, just persistent rain and gloom.
I grew up on the north-east coast - South Shields, to be precise - and I can remember it snowing twice in my lifetime. Clearly, it’s got colder since I’ve been away!
It snowed here last night and is expected to resume a bit today: about 15 cm in total. I spent last evening in the garage putting snow tires on my wife’s car.
Last winter was the second snowiest on record. Here we snow again.
Yes, I’ve noticed! Back home, autumn consists of a few days of warmish weather followed by some clouds that try to threaten rain (nobody believes them) followed by a few coldish days followed by another warmish stretch. Being here is like the speeded-up version of that.
We had some snow yesterday too. It is the earliest that we can remember snow in this part of New Jersey for years. (New Jersey is the small state just south of New York City).
We have heard we should expect a colder and snowier winter after many mild ones.
I hate that we only had a few days between cooling and heating season this fall. I had to set up by heat thermostat to warm the house in the morning only a week after shutting off the cooling stat.
Enjoy the snow, my daughter is really hoping for some big storms this year, but then she is only 11.
Jim
According to the TV news, it hasn’t snowed in southern England in October since 1934. (Well, apparently there was a light flurry in October 1974 but it didn’t settle on the ground.)
I hadn’t realised it was as rare as that.
Looking out of the office here in Luton I can still some small patches of snow. This morning though my entire commute between St Albans and Luton was through snowcovered fields…
I noticed on the BBC Breakfast show that 3 out of the first 5 pictures on the snow emailed by viewers came from St Albans