Tag: weather

Just three days ago we were sweltering in 35°C. Today was so cold that I had to pull out my woollen jumper again (“sweater” for US folks). It was very windy, which made the already cool temperature feel pretty cold.

A friend of mine has said on a few occasions that Sydney doesn’t have nice weather for spring. We have hot and cold days dithered together, early spring having more cold days and late spring having more hot days.

In between ethics classes I took Scully to the brand new park again. It’s a very nice place to sit and eat lunch. And there today I witnessed a Buridan’s Ass moment. A woman came into the park and was looking for a place to sit. She reached a point where there were two empty benches facing each other about 10 metres apart, and she was standing in the middle looking at first one, then the other, then back to the other one… She looked back and forth for maybe 30-40 seconds, before finally continuing to walk, and she eventually found another bench somewhere else.

This evening I had a nice Turkish dinner out with my wife. Hummus and flatbread, grilled haloumi, dolmades, and falafels.

And tonight we were supposed to have in-person board games night, but a few people are away travelling and we would have had three people at most, so we converted to online games and the travellers are joining in.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #5070
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5253
• Comments on a Postcard #5376

It was hot today, like a midsummer day. We reached 35.6°C in the city, and over 37°C in some suburbs. Tuesday is expected to be more of the same, although oddly tomorrow is forecast to be only 24°C. We have a cold southerly change coming through late this evening, but it won’t last very long before the heat builds up again. And this with still 2 months to go before summer starts.

I did manage another 5k run early this morning, before it got too hot, but it was 24°C even at 8am, so it wasn’t particularly comfortable running weather.

My wife and I played another game of Root again, this time swapping roles again so I played the cats and she the birds. It’s a game that requires several plays to understand the strategies, so we’re trying to play it frequently and reinforce our knowledge, not letting it fade from our brains.

Oh, and daylight saving started today here, so I’ve moved all my online classes an hour later, to keep them at the same time for all the students who don’t live in southern Australia – which is basically all of them at the moment except one.

New content today:

• Darths & Droids #2368
• Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2489
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5248
• Comments on a Postcard #5371

The talking point today was all about the weather. We reached 32.8°C in the city, and a degree or two higher in the suburbs. This heat will continue to intensify for the next three days, with a forecast of 34°C on Wednesday, before dropping back to 18°C (a much more normal temperature of this time of year) on Friday.

Despite the morning heat I went for a run, though decided to do just 2.5k today. Then I spent some time writing and producing Darths & Droids comics. I took Scully for a walk after lunch. It really felt like summer out there.

Not much else to report today. I was a bit tired due to getting home late from last night’s D&D game, and then tossing a bit during the night. I had a weird dream: Sigourney Weaver came over for dinner. During dinner she revealed that some years ago she’d secretly impregnated us with Aliens and then removed them just before they chestbursted. I don’t know what she was trying to achieve by telling us this now.

New content today:

• Darths & Droids #2362
• Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2485
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5234
• Comments on a Postcard #5357

There was more smoke blanketing the city this morning, produced by controlled burning of bushland around the outskirts. I saw an article on a news site yesterday explaining why the best days for controlled burns are also more likely to result in the smoke being trapped under an inversion layer over the city, rather than being blown away.

I took this photo while taking Scully for a walk at lunch time. By this time the smoke had actually cleared a bit – it was worse earlier in the day.

The forecast continues to stretch the period of hot days. We’re now expecting 6 days in a row of temperatures over 30°C in much of the city, getting up to 35°C in places, beginning tomorrow. Today was warm, but not hot, only reaching the mid 20s. It would have been very pleasant except for the smoke.

On the way back home with Scully, we ran across an eastern water dragon:

These guys are usually inconspicuous in the winter and only visible in the summery months. So another indicator that the weather is unusually warm for this time of year.

New content today:

• Darths & Droids #2361
• Irregular Webcomic! #5054
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5231
• Comments on a Postcard #5354

It’s officially spring here, and though we’re less than two weeks out of winter it’s already feeling like late spring. Smoke has been hanging in the air over the city for the past few days, the result of controlled burning operations to reduce fuel load in the bush areas on the fringes of the city. Gentle winds have been blowing it across the city and most suburbs have been feeling the effects.

I went into the city a bit early today to pick up a copy of Cyberpunk Red that I’d ordered from the game store. While there I also grabbed copies of Scum & Villainy, and Root: The Roleplaying Game. Then I walked over to the university for this evening’s image processing lecture. I went via Darling Harbour, and caught this photo of the sun in the afternoon sky:

I’d seen earlier in a Sydney forum online someone saying they’d moved here since 2019 and the current smoke was awful, and they were asking if it was anything like the smoke we had during the bushfires in 2019. And everyone was saying this is nothing compared to what it was like in 2019, when we pretty much couldn’t see the sun for days on end and ash was falling from the sky. It was a horrendous, apocalyptic time. What we have now really is nothing compared to that. (My posts from 19 December 2019, 21 Dec, 31 Dec, 12 Jan 2020)

Looking back at the city from the other side of Darling Harbour:

I found another new place for dinner before the lecture. A Thai place, where I had pad Thai with soft-shelled crab:

In other weather news, the ginkgo trees here are starting to show new leaves, later than most of the other trees which are developing new foliage. Lots of flowers are out. And the forecast for the next week is looking ominous. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday are all forecast to have temperatures around 34-35°C in parts of Sydney, though the coast will be a few degrees cooler. This is serious summer weather, before the spring equinox. You can feel everyone here holding their breaths for this impending El Niño summer.

New content today:

• Darths & Droids #2360
• Irregular Webcomic! #5052
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5229
• iToons #726
• Comments on a Postcard #5352

As one of my friends commented, it’s just like Sydney to have 27°C days in winter, and then the first day of spring arrives and it’s cold. We had a strong cold southerly wind blowing all day; it barely reached 18°C and it felt even colder than it really was. It won’t last though, we have a forecast for 25° days again in the next week.

It was another pretty bog-standard Friday. I picked up groceries in the morning before my first ethics class. Then I had a break in which I did a 5k run. I’m doing these more often now, mixing them up with the 2.5k ones.

My wife actually came home at lunch time to work from home for the afternoon. And then we went for a walk with Scully over to Naremburn, and the Flat Rock Brew Cafe for dinner. It was busy with a lot of people having Friday drinks, and many of them had brought dogs as well, so Scully got a bit excited and barky for a while until she settled down. The food is pretty nice pub food, and now I’m really full after a chicken schnitzel topped with bacon, fried egg, tomato sauce, and cheese.

Tonight is board games night online with my friends. I’ve just joined and am waiting for them to finish a game in progress so I can join in. It’s been a pretty full week, with not too much out of the ordinary to report.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #5045
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5218
• Lightning Made of Owls #893
• Comments on a Postcard #5341

The weather, that is. Today the temperature reached 27.3°C here in Sydney, which made it the hottest winter day for 8 years. It didn’t last though. A cold front came through mid-afternoon and dropped the temperature, bringing with it violent thunderstorms. Most of the storms passed south of us, so we didn’t see a lot of rain, but we certainly heard some loud thunder. Parts of Sydney got hail, and over 50mm of rain.

I spent most of today writing lesson plans for the next week of ethics classes. The younger kids are getting a class on “Rules”, and the older kids a class on “Cancel Culture”. Here’s the opening for the Rules one:

Some time in the future, a country named Florin has citizens who value freedom very highly. They have a system where people can propose ideas, and then everyone votes on them. One day someone suggests that to be truly free, there should be no rules. The people vote to try this out for a single day.

The Rule-Free Day is announced a month in advance. The rules are: there will be no rules! Parents will not be able to tell their children what to do, or what not to do. You won’t need to go to school if you don’t want. There are no rules of politeness. There will be no laws, so you can do anything you want and the police won’t stop you.

Saskia and her friends are excited by the Rule-Free Day. They’re planning to go out first thing in the morning and do exactly what they want all day! They’ll eat chocolate for breakfast and then go to the amusement park and climb over the fence and go on all the rides without paying. They’ll go into the kitchen of their favourite fast food place and make themselves hamburgers and huge bowls of ice cream. It’ll be such a great day!

Questions for the class:
What could go wrong?
Does a society of people need to have rules? Why?

There’s a lot more, but I won’t paste the entire lot here. I’ve run this class three times already tonight, and it’s generated some very fun and thoughtful discussion from the kids.

I also chased up an order I made a while back for some roleplaying game books from a local game store. They said they could get them in stock, but I hadn’t heard from them. I sent an email and they said they still didn’t have them, but the guy found one of them with a different distributor and said he could order that one and it should arrive in a week or so. So I said please do that, and we’ll just have to see about the others.

Finally, a photo, which I took last night, just before doing my lecture at the University of Technology Sydney:

I did the lecture in a room on the 5th floor of the new building on the right.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #5043
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5216
• Comments on a Postcard #5339