Today I spent a lot of time keeping track of the opening of the giant corpse flower which is blooming right now at the Royal Botanic Gardens here in Sydney. The specimen of Amorphophallus titanum is the first one to flower here since 2012, and it’s become a media sensation, with a live stream on YouTube that got up to almost 10,000 viewers at various times during the day.
The queue to get into the hothouse to see the flower is apparently now almost 3 hours long. They are keeping the Gardens open until midnight tonight specially for this event, but closing the queue at 9pm, to account for the waiting time. Oh! I just read on the livestream that they’ve already cut the queue off, 3.5 hours before midnight. Yeah, expected waiting time now 3.5 hours.
It’s a weird thing, but this has really captured the imagination of Sydney. A positive thing bringing people together as they celebrate a wonder of nature.
The other main thing that happened today is the guy finally came to install our new window blinds, that we ordered in early December. The delay was caused by the previous installation guy taking emergency extended leave from work because of a family health issue, so they had to reschedule our installation with other staff. The guy arrived after my morning ethics classes and spent an hour or so installing the new blinds. Thankfully he took the old ones away too, which was good, because I don’t know how we would have disposed of them otherwise.
Oh, and while that was happening, another guy knocked on my front door. When I opened it he said he was here to measure the door, for replacement. This was the first I’d heard of any such thing. It turns out at the annual fire safety inspection for the apartment block a couple of months ago, the inspector failed our front door, and we have to get a new one installed. But nobody told me about this, until today when the guy knocked on the door! HE said it’ll take them a month or so to make the new door to the right measurements, and then someone will come and install it.
New content today: