weather – dangermouse.net

New window sills and coat racks

The builder came back today to complete work on our new window sills. I took photos yesterday to show some of the work being done. Here’s one of the living room windows after the wooden sill was removed, showing the cracked masonry underneath.

And here’s the same window after the masonry was repaired and the new sill was put in place, but before it was painted. (The perspective is different because I used the wider angle lens on my phone.)

Today the builder filled in some small gaps, then sanded and painted the sills with undercoat. We’re leaving them like that and the final coat will be put on by the painters who will be doing everything in October.

While he was here, I got the builder to drill holes for me to install new coat racks in the bedroom. After he left I screwed them in and they look great. The builder also stuck our apartment number back on the outside of the front door. It had been taken off the old door before it got replaced for fire safety reasons back in March(!) and hadn’t been replaced yet.

Apart from all this I had an online science class and essay writing class to teach, and then this evening three critical thinking classes. In the science class I got the student to dissolve salt, sugar, and epsom salts in three different glasses of water, and we’re going to evaporate them and make crystals. Hopefully by next week’s class we’ll see some good ones.

The other news today is the weather. The forecast yesterday when I looked was for 10-35 mm of rain. But we’ve now had 75 mm in less than 12 hours, with another 12 hours to go before the daily total is recorded at 9am, plus another 7 mm overnight last night. The rain has been truly torrential at times – we had almost 20 mm in one half-hour period. And lots of lightning and very loud thunder. Several times the thunder rattled the windows, it was that close and loud. The forecast for tonight warns of the possibility of damaging winds and heavy hail. And tomorrow we are expecting up to another 35 mm of rain. Some flood warnings have been issued for parts of the state.

It looks like there’ll be a break in the rain for a while, on the rain radar. Hopefully in time for when I take Scully out tonight for her bedtime toilet!

A taste of summer in early spring

Today was all about the weather. We’re just emerging from winter, but today got up to 29°c here in Sydney, and over 30°C in some suburbs. Our warmest day since mid-April. It won’t last though, Wednesday is forecast to be 19°C and Thursday just 17°C. My friends and I have often said that spring in Sydney is not a series of gradually warming days – it’s a series of hot and cold days dithered together.

I did my four online classes this morning, then took Scully to my wife’s work. I ran 5k back home in the heat – it was about 27°C at the time, before the peak heat. It wasn’t too bad actually, since the humidity was low.

Then (after a shower and change) I went into the city for tonight’s university lecture on image processing. Tonight the lecturer discussed deep learning techniques and demonstrated several on various image classification and recognition problems.

When I was getting on the train to go into the city, an old lady with a walker was getting off. So I stepped aside to let her get off first without crowding her, before I got on. When she got off she gave me a death stare and said in an offended/sarcastic voice, “Well thanks for helping me!” 😳 I totally would have helped her if she’d asked for any help. Otherwise I’m staying politely out of the way.

In the city I had Chinese noodles for dinner, at Chinese Noodle House. Not China Noodle House, nor Chinese Noodle Restaurant, which are other establishments within sight of Chinese Noodle House.

A touch of spring?

After last week’s cold and relentless rain, this week is turning out beautifully. It’s sunny and even a little warm. It feels like spring is arriving. Many flowers have been appearing already. Magnolias are in full bloom in many places, and some of the trees are even losing their flowers and showing new green foliage already. Cherry blossoms are out, and azaleas are appearing too.

However the Bureau of Meteorology tells us it’s all an illusion. They say next week will see four cold fronts in rapid succession, bringing possibly the coldest weather of the entire year and more rain. They’re even saying it might snow in places like Canberra, where it rarely happens. Also there will be gale force winds with possible destructive effects. But I’m enjoying this week’s warmth while it lasts.

I spent today working on a science lesson for an online class tomorrow. We’re going to do states of matter and a precipitation reaction, with epsom salts and washing soda.

I’m also struggling with two technical issues. For the past two days I’ve been trying to withdraw funds from PayPal into my bank account. I’ve done this many times in the past and never had any issues. But every time I try to do it since yesterday, PayPal has displayed an error message telling me I’m over my daily withdrawal limit. I didn’t even know they had a daily withdrawal limit. But no matter how low I make the amount, it still says I’m over the limit. So I can’t get any money out of PayPal at all.

Secondly, my wife recently got a new laptop, a MacBook Air. I’m trying to set it up to use my network backup drive as the Time Machine backup drive. I’ve followed all the instructions on apple.com to set up the drive as a shared network drive, with a user with read/write access, and I can connect to the drive from the new MacBook. But when I try to configure it as the Time Machine backup drive, it says it doesn’t have read/write permission to the drive, despite me connecting with my username and password (my username that does have read/write permission to that drive). I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

More pleasantly, here’s a photo of that waffle I had for lunch the other day:

Nice looking, isn’t it?

And here’s a photo I took today which I’ve annotated with all the new high-rise apartment construction going on in the neighbourhood.

This doesn’t show all the construction either. There’s more hidden behind the palm tree on the left. I’ll try to take another photo from a different location and show some of that too.

Even rainier and colder, and Scully’s teeth

Today was really cold and even rainier than yesterday. Sydney only reached a maximum of 13.8°C. Given how badly insulated Australian homes are, I was sitting inside all day, dressed in multiple layers, drinking hot tea, and freezing. I had to stop working several times just to try to warm my hands up.

And I just realised I completely forgot to do an update yesterday! Not that there was much to say other than that it was cold and rainy, though as it turned out not nearly as cold and rainy as today. Yesterday I spent time outlining my new critical thinking class for this week, on the topic of Mistakes. Then I developed a new class on the chemistry of acids and bases for that kid whose mother requested a science course for him. IN the evening I had a class and had a new student who brought my tally of countries that students are in to 60. The 60th country was Bahrain.

Oh, I also typed up a full recap of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, for the players to check over before our next session on Friday evening.

Today I just stayed inside and tried to stay warm. I did venture out in the car to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get some lunch. I did some prep work for Friday’s D&D game, looking thorugh some adventure material and thinking about where the PCs might go and what they might do. I also did some Darths & Droids comic writing.

But today Scully had to go to the vet for a teeth cleaning. She had one two years ago, and the vet at her annual checkup said she could use another one. My wife took her in in the morning and Scully was there the whole day until this evening. The vet x-rayed her teeth and found that one was cracked, so they had to remove it. So poor Scully is now woozy from the anaesthetic and some painkiller, a bit lethargic. But she ate a decent amount of dinner, so that’s a good sign. Very soft food instead of her usual crunchy kibbles. Hopefully she’ll be back to her perky self tomorrow.

Rainy Monday and very cold

I’d planned to do a run today, but conditions conspired against me. It was very cold overnight. When I got up and took Scully out for her morning toilet, I checked my weather app an it was about 7°C, but the “fells like” temperature was -0.4°C! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that “feels like” as a negative number before. It certainly did feel very cold.

The morning was clear while I was teaching my set of online classes. But by the time I finished at 1pm, the rain had moved in, and it was solid and at times heavy. I don’t mind running in the rain, or when it’s chilly, but combined it’s a bit too much. It would just be too freezing.

Instead I used the time to go over the lecture notes for next week’s Image Processing lecture at the university, which I’ll be giving while the lecturer is away. Today’s lecture was on pattern recognition and image features, leading into next week’s introduction to machine learning for image processing. I know the subject fairly well and it shouldn’t be difficult to give that lecture, but I wanted to check in case I had any questions about particular slides or topics that I wanted to ask the lecturer before next week.

I had to brave the rain to go into the city for tonight’s lecture. And it was very cold again. But I survived to tell the tale!

A wet walk for lunch

Today was cold and just before lunch time it started raining. This wasn’t good, as I’d planned to walk up the street to buy a few things we needed. I decided I had to go, and rugged Scully up in a warm rain jacket, grabbed an umbrella and my trench coat, and braved the elements.

I was looking for somewhere to get a nice lunch that wasn’t too expensive. Prices have been ballooning recently and it’s hard to get lunch anywhere for under $20 any more. But a nice pizza place had an $18 lunch special, so I grabbed a barbecue chicken pizza there and that was pretty good. We had to sit outside in the cold, sheltered from the rain under the awning.

Apart from that it was a fairly ordinary day, nothing exciting.

Rainy running and Pathfinder session 3

Friday night was games night, and although this week was scheduled as face-to-face in the fortnightly rotation, we played Pathfinder online as it was a good day for all of the players to attend. This is the campaign my friend began running back in March, with the second session in May. In this third session we continued exploring the underground complex we’d been led to by a map last time.

We entered a chamber with an ominous skull-shaped platform above surrounding water, with an ominous statue looking down at it. Here manifested what we learnt to be a projection of a demon-like figure, with horns and wings. He was talkative and tried to cajole us into signing contracts for power in an ominous-looking floating book. In exchange for this power, we were to spend eternity in his servitude after our deaths. We spent enough time looking at the book to notice that Nana Slimebristle seemed to have signed such a contract, although with many crossed out parts and emendations added in. This was the Nana whose grave we’d found in session one, empty, with the dirt pushed aside as though something within had climbed out.

With this puzzle piece falling into place, and the demon thing starting to threaten us to sign the book or else prepare to die, we noped out of there quick smart, basically turning tail and running. We managed to get away without being caught, so that seemed a sensible course of action. While deciding what to do, we felt a force drawing us north, where we found a cave and decided to camp for the night.

Orcs attacked during the night and we had to fight them off. Partway through the battle an old, haggard, kinda undead looking woman appeared and helped us. Yup… it turned out to be Nana Slimebristle. We talked and she seemed teed off at the demon Vrasted, so we offered to help her. She suggested we travel north to the mountains to retrieve a magical thingy of hers that she’d lost there or something. And there we ended for the night.

Earlier in the day I’d done the usual grocery pickup and critical thinking classes. After completing my morning batch of classes, I drove with my wife and Scully over to Mix Deli, the new outlet for Lil’ Mix bakery, where we got some lunch: cream cheese filled Jerusalem bagel and a mushroom pie, and some blueberry banana bread for sweets. It was incredibly busy, I think because we were there at the lunch rush, which we might not have been before.

It rained heavily overnight and showered on and off all day today. I tried to pick a dry period to go for a run, but failed dramatically. It began raining almost as soon as I left the house and was heavy for most of the run. Nevertheless, I exerted myself and did 7.5k today instead of my normal 5k. It felt longish, but I didn’t feel too bad afterwards, and completed the distance in just over 43 minutes.

This evening I did a sketching challenge with my wife. We both started on a drawing at the same time of this old photo I took at Bronte Beach:

I just used a 2B pencil and here’s my effort:

My wife is still working on adding watercolour to hers.

More rain, getting out in between

The rainy weather continued for the sixth straight day, with intermittent heavy showers. But today was a bit warmer than the past few days, so it didn’t feel nearly as bad. And the breaks between showers allowed some activity.

I went for a 5k run, leaving as a shower was tailing off. It picked up and rained heavily again for a couple of minutes as I was doing my warm-up walk to my starting spot. But by the time I began my run the rain had stopped, and it didn’t rain for the entire run, which was good. But when I was back close to home and doing my post-run stretches in the park the rain started up again, and was getting heavy by the time I dashed home a couple of minutes later. But it was good to get the exercise in.

I jumped straight in the shower, and also took the opportunity to clean the shower with disinfectant and scrub the surfaces clean of soap scum. A task which is okay in warmer weather but not fun in the cold.

At lunch time my wife and I took Scully for a walk and to get some lunch at a cafe. We left right after another rain shower and walked to the cafe without getting wet, except for a few drips falling from trees. I haven’t been to this cafe before, and I tried their hot roast chicken sandwich on Turkish bread, which was really good. While we were eating, the rain returned and was really heavy for a few minutes. But it stopped again before we left, and we managed to walk home again dry. Then within 10 minutes after we got home, it was pouring again.

This has been the pattern all day. It’s now late evening and we just had another heavy downpour, that lasted a few minutes. Thankfully the rain should ease up tomorrow and there may be only light falls the next few days.

In one of my critical thinking/ethics classes tonight I had a scenario on sharing:

A park has 3 picnic tables. A family arrives and spreads out across all 3, even though they could fit on 2. Later another family arrives and could fit one 1 table, so they ask the first family to move over onto 2 to free up the other one for them.
Should the first family move over, or do they have precedence on all 3 tables because they got there first?

One kid was sort of looking to one side of his video as I asked for his answer. He said, “My mother wants to know if the families know each other, because you shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

Start of a week of rain

Two natural events dominated today: the massive 8.8 earthquake off Kamchatka and the subsequent tsunamis events still rolling across the Pacific Ocean as I write this; and the local weather here in Sydney.

It’s raining here, and has been all day, and the forecast is that we’ll only see the sun again next Tuesday. It’s not especially heavy, but has been steady and the accumulated total over the next six days is forecast to potentially be well over 100 mm. And it’s very cold. We’d been enjoying some warmer temperatures, but now we’ve plunged back into cold about as harsh as Sydney ever gets.

I did brave the weather briefly at lunch time to go buy some bread. But other than that I’ve bee rugged up at home trying to stay warm. One of my classes tonight had a Japanese student, but she didn’t show up, so I guess her schedule might have been disrupted by tsunami evacuations.

In some good news, I received a response from the local council about my request to spray the nearby park for bindii weeds. The grassy areas where Scully likes to walk and sniff around are covered with this weed and in the spring make it almost impossible for her to walk there due to the thorns. The council sprays larger parks for bindii, but they’ve always neglected this one small one near my place. I’ve asked them in the past to spray it, but this year for the first time they’ve responded positively and said they will add it to the spraying roster this year and for the future. Yay!

A cold, cold run and lunchtime walk

As you can probably guess, it was cold again today. My wife took Scully to work and I did a 5k run and it was very cold, around 12°C. But I think the cold weather means I don’t get too hot running, since I managed to clock under 27 minutes for the fourth time in my last six runs, when I hadn’t broken that time for several months previously.

I spent time today working on more advance Darths & Droids strips to buffer over the time I’ll be away on my upcoming European holiday. The script writing today was particularly tricky, though I don’t want to spoil anything by saying exactly why.

After eating lunch (my home-baked sourdough with cheese and tomato), I caught a train up to my wife’s work and met her there at a cafe that i hadn’t been to before. They had home-baked dog treats, with chicken and vegetables in them, and she’d bought one to let Scully try it. Scully is very hit and miss with different dog treats – some she doesn’t eat at all. But this one she really liked.

My wife went back to work and I walked all the way home with Scully. It was a chilly afternoon, but my multiple layers of clothing and the bright sun shining on my back made it bearable. We walked past a bunya pine tree, which had these warning signs posted around it:

The bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) is the large tree at the top left, behind the foreground foliage. It grows enormous, heavy seed cones, from 3 kg up to around 10 kg, which can fall from heights as high as 40 metres. They have caused serious injuries to people. Bunya pines are not very common in Sydney, but there are a few around, and it’s a good idea to be cautious around them during the cone-dropping season. Although that’s January to March, so I’m not sure what the warning signs here were for. I guess the council just didn’t remove them. I wrote a blog entry three years ago about collecting bunya nuts from fallen cones, which had this photo showing how large the cones are:

Tonight I had my first three ethics classes on the “Let’s Design a Government” topic, and they went pretty well. I have tons of questions which we didn’t get through, which is way better than ending up with not enough!