weather – dangermouse.net

Cool relief, Christmas ham

Today was thankfully much cooler than yesterday. We had a stiff breeze blowing and the temperature only reached around 24°C. Rather than having the air conditioning on all day, I had the windows all wide open. It rained a bit in the morning, including when I went out for a 5k run. I managed a much faster time than any other recent run, in the cooler air.

Then I drove over to the nearest Aldi supermarket that has parking – there’s one a bit closer but it’s in a business area with lots of office buildings and impossible to park anywhere nearby. So I almost never go into Aldi. But I wanted to today to pick up a Christmas ham. I also grabbed a few other things while there: a Christmas stollen, a panettone, and some brie and sliced turkey for making lunch sandwiches.

After eating a lunch of turkey and brie sandwiches on my home made sourdough bread, I walked up to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. And when we got home I worked on some more Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up a buffer.

I made some pesto pasta with broccoli for dinner, before my three ethics classes in a row, which took up the evening.

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Hot weather, southerly buster

The record-breaking heatwave affecting inland Australia made its way to the east coast today. Inland suburbs of Sydney touched 42°C, but it remained a bit cooler nearer the coast where I am, thankfully, in the low 30s. But the humidity was still over 50% in the hottest part of the day here, whereas inland it dropped into the 20s for that dry heat effect.

Knowing this was the forecast, I took Scully out for a long walk around 7am, before it got too hot. We did the Waverton loop, going around the harbour shore. There’s one house that we pass where the owners always plant sunflowers, and they were in bloom.

The birds were out in force in the morning, especially by the water. I spotted this group of eight little black cormorants… or was it seven with a clever imposter??

(Spoiler: It’s a silver gull.) I did a couple of bird counts for eBird and recorded 18 different species.

Back home, I sheltered in the air conditioning for most of the day. working on Darths & Droids comics. I want to get ahead because there’ll be some time spent story planning for Episode IX when we start that very soon. And I need to build up a buffer for upcoming trips in the new year.

This evening I had the first class of the final week’s critical & ethical thinking topic for the year. We’re just having fun this week, with hypothetical “What if?” questions, getting the kids to think through logical consequences of weird scenarios. For example: What if social media likes were used as money? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was? What if everyone had a twin who it was impossible to tell apart?

The last one generated some very interesting discussion. One kid said people could commit crimes and nobody could be punished, because it would be impossible to know if you arrested the correct twin, and you’d have to avoid punishing the incorrect person. But another kid suggested that if it was truly impossible to tell the twins apart, they might be treated like a single person, and share one identity, one bank account, one job, etc. And if either one committed a crime, both would be punished. Actually all of the questions generated interesting discussions of the consequences. So it was a lot of fun. Perfect for the last class before Christmas.

Just after 8pm the southerly buster arrived with force. This is the local name for the cold front coming through from the south which rapidly reduces the temperature after a hot day, and brings cold strong winds and thunderstorms. We had very close lightning and loud thunder, and about 30 minutes of absolutely torrential rain, before it eased off. Thankfully it’s a lot cooler outside now, although the humidity has skyrocketed back around 95%. Tomorrow is forecast to be much cooler than today, around 25°C. Phew!

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Hotness, classes, and D&D logging

Today was very warm. Much of Australia is enduring an heatwave, with the highest temperatures we’ve seen in five years (the past four summers have been cooler and wetter thanks to La Niña). Some towns in western New South Wales today were expected to potentially break their highest ever recorded temperatures, around 47°C. Inland suburbs of Sydney got into the high 30s, but fortunately the coastal strip was significantly cooler, reaching only 29°C in the city. But the humidity remains stupidly high, so it felt oppressive being out there.

After two morning ethics classes, I walked with Scully up to the fish & chip shop, and grabbed an Express Post envelope from the adjacent post office for mailing some documents. I didn’t want to walk back with the large envelope, and a box of fish & chips, and have to carry Scully over the parts of the road and footpaths that were baking in the sun and would have burnt her feet, so I ordered my lunch to eat in at the outdoor tables. Although these are shaded, it was so hot and humid sitting there that the sweat was just rolling down my face and body.

I got back home in time for my afternoon classes. After those I completed writing up a log of the previous Dungeons & Dragons session that we played back in October, which I hadn’t yet written up. Thankfully I’m now fully up to date with the campaign logs, all 12 sessions played so far. Next time we meet we should be starting a new adventure, which will be nice. Although the party has to contend with a curse placed on them by the God of Swords: to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die! My players are a fairly moralistic group, so this presents them with a significant ethical dilemma. They’re not just going to go around and slaughter the next 9 people they come across. It will be very interesting to see how they deal with this.

For dinner I made a cool falafel salad. I tried boiling two eggs to add to the salads, but I think I must have set the stove too low to simmer them, and the first one I tried to peel was too soft-boiled. I boiled the second egg for another 5 minutes and it came out fine, so we ended up with half an egg each instead of a whole one in our salads.

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Dungeons & Dragons and hot weather

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and then in the evening I hosted our intermittent Dungeons & Dragons game with my friends. Our last session was in October, and we picked up where we left off.

The party were attempting to collect a series of magical swords. They found one being wielded by a giant octopus and engaged in combat. One of them severed the tentacle that was holding the sword, and two of the others tried to catch it before it fell into the deep pool of water, but both failed, so they had to do some diving into the water after the octopus had been dispatched, and incidentally obscured the water with ink and blood.

But the highlight of the evening was when they encountered a somewhat crazy mermaid queen, who challenged individuals to defeat her in combat, and promised to marry any who could do so. Well, the human fighter of the group managed this (after the elf failed), and was quickly married in a ceremony, and even crowned with a crown made of coral.

Later they encountered a vampire who was immobile, staked to the wall by one of the magic swords they were intent on retrieving. They had to work out how to gain the sword without letting the vampire loose to attack them. Overall it was a great fun game, with lots of amusing events and much fun had by all.

This morning I did my 5k run in warm and humid conditions. I fear it’s going to be like this until summer ends in a few months. The weather bureau has warned that the next few days are going to be the hottest days in five years for much of Australia.

In the heat of the day we drove over to my wife’s mother’s place to help her get out all the Christmas decorations, to ready the place for the Christmas Day lunch. Traffic was bad heading out towards the coast as lots of people were heading to the beaches. And on the water were lots of boats full of people enjoying the sunny weather.

We came home and I made pizza for dinner. And afterwards we walked Scully in the cooler evening air, after sunset. Although it was still 24°C. It’s probably not going to get much cooler than that overnight.

For dessert we had a mango. This time we had a Kensington Pride variety, which is no doubt the most “mango-ey” variety in flavour. It’s the fourth different type of mango we’ve had so far this summer. As the season progresses other varieties will ripen and become available, so it’s an interesting progression in flavours and textures.

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Games night and a very sticky Saturday

Friday morning I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I take Scully up to meet my wife at the gym nearby after her early morning class, but her gym has closed down and so this week I just went up alone. Berries are all pretty cheap at the moment as they’re in season, so I bought punnets of blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries as part of our fruit haul. (Also two varieties of apples, bananas, and an orange. I skipped the mangoes this week.)

During the day I had four ethics classes on the Alien Invasion topic. One kid who a few weeks ago in the Robots topic was obsessed with rounding up and destroying all the robots because they were evil and wanted to enslave humanity, this week decided that when aliens come to Earth we need to round up all their robots and destroy them.

For dinner we decided not to eat out, but rather to get take-away from Green Gourmet, a vegan Chinese restaurant that we used to frequent before we got Scully. Unfortunately they are on the highway and don’t have outdoor tables, so we’ve never dined there with Scully. While my wife and Scully waited outside the front door and I went in to order, I explained this to the woman who took my order, pointing at Scully outside. But she said it was no problem, we could bring a dog inside to eat at one of the indoor tables! And she said if the front room was full, there was a small room out the back where we could eat with Scully too.

Having dogs in the indoor dining areas of restaurants is not normal here. In fact, strictly speaking it’s not allowed according to the law (apart from service dogs), but some places are more accommodating about it than others. Which is why we normally have to sit at an outdoor table when taking Scully. But now that we know that Green Gourmet will let us take Scully in, we can go back to this place. They have some delicious meals. We took home some vegetable and faux-pork steamed buns, Szechuan deep-fried cauliflower, and a hotpot dish with protein balls and vegetables. And rice. It was really good, and there was plenty left over for my dinner tonight too.

While eating I joined my friends online for board games. We played a game of The Castles of Burgundy. It took me a while to remember the rules, but I did pretty well, coming second of four players. We tried a new game, Rallyman: DIRT, but none of us knew the rules and it was too tricky to work out quickly enough, so we abandoned that for another day. We moved on to Just One, and had an absolutely awful start to the game.

Three of the first four words were guessed incorrectly, despite none of the five clues being duplicated (and hence removed) in each case. In fact, weirdly the only clue that was duplicated in the first 6 or 7 rounds was “Rumpelstiltskin” (for the word “spinning wheel”). We ended up scoring only 8 correct answers in 15 rounds. Pretty awful going. Then we moved on to Jump Drive and played about five or six games, of which I won two. I also had one miserable game where the winner ended on 97 points, while I only had 28!

Today was awful, weather-wise. It began with a loud thunderstorm that woke me up at 5:30. By the time I got up and had breakfast and was ready for my 5k run, it was already 24°C and 94% humidity. It was really oppressive and difficult to run. I felt very slow and thought I’d be lucky to stay under 30 minutes, but was surprised when I managed 28:15. I was absolutely soaked with sweat though! I had a cold shower immediately, and then another one about half an hour later after I’d cooled down some more.

I worked on Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! strips today. I have enough of the latter written to do some Lego photography tomorrow.

We went out for a walk with Scully just before 5pm. It was gloomy when we left, having been raining on and off all day, and I thought it wouldn’t be too bad, but the clouds parted and the sun came out as we walked and steamed things up. The temperature had stayed around 25°C most of the day, but now while walking around it warmed up to almost 29°C, and with humidity around 80%. It felt like the times we were in Bangkok, or the Amazon jungle. Really, really draining just to walk at a normal pace.

In other news, the agenda for the next ISO Photography meeting in Tokyo in February has been released. This is the last thing required for me to get travel funding from Standards Australia for my trip there. So hopefully that will be processed soon. I’m beginning to really look forward to being in Tokyo in February, where it will be nice and cold!

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Like Garfield, Mondays are the toughest days of the week

A total of six ethics classes eat up a lot of the day. I walked Scully at lunch time, but not too far as it was a hot day. The roads and footpaths get so hot in the sun that I only really let Scully walk on shaded areas. If they’re in full sun, I reach down to feel the paving and it was definitely too hot today to let her walk on without potentially burning her feet, so I had to carry her part of the way.

In the early evening I made pizza for dinner. And then went for a walk as the sun was going down with my wife and Scully. It was cooler, but still on the warm side and humid. But now at least the paths had cooled down so Scully could have a solid walk.

I think the nearby shops that we walk past should have a gelato shop! But interestingly the fish & chip shop is now open on Mondays. It never used to open on Mondays. My wife thinks that it must have new owners who have decided to extend the opening hours.

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More storms and steamy weather

It’s beginning to feel like a tropical rainforest here. It was warm and sticky again when I went for my 5k run this morning, at 7:30 which was earlier than yesterday, but it was warmer and another difficult effort.

Just before 3pm we had a huge storm, with a lot of loud thunder, which dumped 34 mm of rain on Sydney in less than half an hour. Then it stopped and warmed up again, driving the humidity sky high again. it’s really pretty unpleasant. The weather bureau did warn us this summer would be wetter than usual. I’d just love a hot day with low humidity for a change.

I did another Darths & Droids comic this morning, and did a bunch of housecleaning stuff. Cleaned the bathroom, shower cubicle, and vacuumed the floors. Which was hard, sweaty work in this weather.

Not much else to say today. I was a bit tired because it was warm during the night and Scully decided to snuggle up right against my back during the night for some reason, making me even warmer and disrupting my sleep a bit.

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Games on Friday and Saturday

The weather has turned from hot and humid to warm, rainy, and very humid. At least it’s not as hot as Monday to Thursday. Friday was cooler, but very wet. There was a huge thunderstorm around midday, and I had to warn students in my ethics Zoom class that if I disappeared it might be because of a power blackout. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but there some very loud cracks of thunder during the class.

Today has been ridiculously humid. It dropped as low as 87% in the mid-afternoon during a break in the rain, but it’s back up in the high 90s where it’s been most of the day. It was 99% and 21°C when I did my 5k run at 9am this morning. Which made it really draining as breathing deeply while running was like in a sauna.

Friday night was games night at a friend’s place. I took Arcs and we played a four player game, with three of the same players as last time when we all learnt it, and one new player. He picked up the idea quickly and actually ended up winning.

The game took a while to play, and by the time we were done the host was tired, so we didn’t play anything else.

Today, I played a game of Root with my wife. She tried the Marquise de Cat this time, after having played Alliance for the past several games. We used the clockwork expansion bots to fill it out to four players, and it’s the first time we’ve used the Alliance bot player. I played the Vagabond, so we also had a bot Eyrie. The bots started very strong and quickly raced to the lead two places in points. I was really afraid the Alliance bot would win the game. But my wife played a timely Dominance card and secured three mouse clearings with about six cat warriors each and managed to win just before the Alliance could get enough points.

For dinner we went up to Organica and had some pizza tonight. It was sprinkling lightly when we went there, and also on the way home. At least it was better than heavy rain.

In other news: I saw today that Elon Musk has threatened to buy Hasbro and hence Dungeons & Dragons, after his recent unhinged anti-woke rant about D&D. I honestly cannot think of a worse thing for the game. But I rest easy knowing that there are so many roleplaying games out there that people will continue enjoying them in wholesome ways no matter what Musk does.

But I just wanted to point out that I predicted this over 8 months ago! Irregular Webcomic! #5157:

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Sauna weather

Not weather to take a sauna. Weather that is like a sauna. It was really steamy today. The minimum temperature overnight was 24°C, and really humid. I took Scully for a walk first thing in the morning, before breakfast, to avoid the hotter middle of the day, and it was already warm and steamy. When I got home I had to take my sweaty shirt off and let it dry in the bathroom while I changed into a fresh one.

Around midday we had a brief burst of thunder and heavy rain, but it didn’t last very long. It cooled things down briefly, but the temperature began climbing again afterwards, and the wet roads emitted steam into the air. I took Scully out for a short walk and toilet and the air was thick, like breathing in hot soup. I was very glad to return to the air conditioned comfort inside.

I tried to find some cicada shells to photograph and show here, but despite looking around on dozens of trees while out with Scully I didn’t spot any. Just the other day I saw three one on small tree!

I had more ethics classes on “Points of View” and I think I’m getting a handle on how to present questions to the kids on this topic. We’ve been having some very interesting discussions about it.

Oh, it’s also the start of mango season! We had a couple of Calypso mangoes last week, and this week I bought an R2-E2 mango, which I just shared with my wife. It’s good trying all of the different varieties, as they’re quite different once you compare them and get a familiarity for the different flavours and textures.

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Cicada summer

One very noticeable thing about this summer we’re rapidly steaming into: cicadas. The past few years there’s been a distinct lack of cicadas, but this year there’s clearly been a huge hatching. The buzzing of the trees with cicadas is loud and obvious, especially in the early evening. Last night we had to turn the TV up louder than usual to hear it – even with the windows closed.

I’ve also seen a lot more cicada shells left behind in tree trunks as the moulting insects leave them. They’re all over the place. The common Australian species Cyclochila australasiae (“green grocers”) and Thopha saccata (“double drummers”) are different to the North American cicadas, and don’t have the famous periodical breeding patterns. They seem to be a lot less predictable, maybe related to the climate or predators or something. The Australian species are also known for being the loudest insects in the world. Which I can testify to.

It was another hot and humid day today, perfect for the cicadas. Overnight the temperature didn’t drop below 20°C, which is a bit too warm for comfortable sleeping. Tomorrow should be hot too, but with late rain moving in to cool things down for the next few days.

First thing this morning I had to go see my doctor for a routine checkup and blood test results> Rather than brave the heat and walk like I normally would, I took the train there, and then the Metro back, stopping off on the way home to pick up a pastry from Moon Phase (right next door to the Metro station). I think there were only two things on their regular menu that I haven’t tried yet (apart from a tiramisu and an Earl Grey tea thing, which I won’t ever have because of the caffeine). So today I tried the pistachio and rose concoction. It’s a squat cylinder of pastry topped with flowery pink icing and, as I discovered, filled with a substantial pistachio cream filling and raspberries. It was much denser and more filling than I’d assumed.

In the afternoon I did some Darths & Droids comics stuff and made a sourdough loaf. And then had three ethics classes in the evening. I revamped some of the questions and think the lesson plan runs better than last night’s one.

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