Everyone who lives in Sydney knows that August is the windy month. But this year it’s been an unusual August, with not much wind and unusually high temperatures. Until today, when the wind hit with a fury.
We’ve had wind gusts recorded up to 95 km/h, and it’s been extremely windy basically all day, starting before dawn, and still blowing noisily outside now at 9pm. Trees have been swaying wildly. I had to take Scully out for a walk at lunch time, and we passed jacaranda trees which were shedding yellow leaves in huge billowing clouds. No doubt there are some trees that have been blown down by this wind.
Normally the August wind is cold. But today was hot. 28.1°C in the city, up to 29.6°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow will be cooler but the forecast for Friday is 30°C. This would be warm for summer, but it’s still winter! We may even be in with a chance to break the hottest winter day ever recorded.
Today I spent time writing new Darths & Droids strips and sorting out and inventorying more Magic cards. An unfortunate thing happened with my ongoing selling of cards. There are some junky uncommon cards from the Legends expansion of 1994 that were never worth very much – puttering along at resale values around US$5. Until the release of a new card in June which created a powerful combo with these old cards. Suddenly they spiked to over US$80 each briefly before settling into a new stable price around US$50. I decided this would be a good time to sell these old cards and I put half a dozen of them onto eBay last week, expecting to get well over $300 for them.
But yesterday Wizards of the Coast announced a new card ban, banning the new card from tournaments because it was overpowered. So now this combo is no longer legal in tournament decks. With two days left to run on my auctions. I’d been expecting people to bid the cards up to around $50 each in the last day, as is usual for auctions. But now I’m not sure what they’ll make, and I may end up mailing out a bunch of cards that people buy for $10 each – and it will be $21 in postage if anyone overseas buys them (though the buyer also pays postage, but this may just discourage people even further from bidding).
Oh well… they’re bits of cardboard and they’re only ever worth what someone will pay for them.
New content today: