Tag: weather

Not so rainy day

The rain eased off a bit today and we had intermittent showers, although it rained heavily overnight. Sydney is well on track to record its wettest year since rainfall records began. We’ve recorded 1768.6 mm since the start of 2022, and the wettest year ever recorded was 2194 mm in 1950. We’re barely halfway through the year, so if the second half is similar to the first we could potentially end up with over 3000 mm.

A new week of ethics classes started today. I wrote up the new topic: Fighting. I’m asking the kids questions such as:

  • Is getting into a fight ever justified?
  • If two people agree to have a fight, should it be allowed? With fists? With weapons?
  • Is it okay to carry a dangerous weapon, for the sole reason of self defence?
  • Are combat sports like boxing or mixed martial arts, where the goal is to actually hurt your opponent, okay or not?

I think this is a good topic, as it’s generated some interesting and diverse answers in the first three classes tonight!

New content today:

Very rainy day number 3

Another 150 mm of rain recorded in parts of Sydney since yesterday. Although again mostly in the southern suburbs, not directly where I am – we only got a bit over 40 mm here. In fact, the rain stopped falling for a brief period around lunchtime today, and I took the opportunity to take Scully for a walk and get some sushi for lunch. Our garage didn’t even flood!

In terms of more widespread flooding, today was worse than yesterday, as rivers were still rising. About 30,000 people have been evacuated under evacuation orders in place across 70 localities. And sadly a handful of people have died in the floodwaters. Thousands more have needed rescuing. There’s a cargo ship stranded off the coast in heavy seas with a broken engine, and it’s been impossible for rescue helicopters to get the crew off due to the rough sea. There was danger the ship might drift ashore and run aground, but tugboats are now pushing it further out to sea.

We’re still expecting more heavy falls overnight and into tomorrow, but it should ease up during the day. Hopefully.

Looking on the funny side, Australia’s two main satirical “news” websites (like The Onion), have the following headlines today:

New content today:

Very rainy day number 2

The predicted rain didn’t seem quite so heavy here during today. Most of the storm system hit a bit further south. Toens just south of Sydney recorded over 300 mm of rain in 24 hours, and some southern suburbs of Sydney recorded over 250 mm, but near me we only got 94 mm in the 24-hour reporting period. Tomorrow is forecast to be worse, though, as the system slowly moves north over the city proper.

Already parts of the outer suburbs are flooding, and evacuation orders are in place along some of the rivers. Warragamba Dam, Sydney’s main reservoir, began spilling around midnight last night, dumping more water into the downstream river system. Last time (back in April) it took days of rain to fill the dam before it began spilling. This time it was already still so full that just a day of rain did it. A few years ago, that downstream river had a new bridge built over it, one the Government said would be “flood-proof” and would never have to close, unlike the old bridge. Well, that new bridge has flooded twice back in April, and is about to go under again.

In April we had two separate “once in 100 years” level flood events within a few weeks. Now we have another one, and this one is on track to be the worst of the three.

I’m safe where I am – I don’t live in a low-lying area. Although I’m half expecting our building’s basement garage to flood again.

In other news, I worked on Darths & Droids a bit today, did some housecleaning, and just stayed inside out of the rain and tried to stay warm. Oh, and my sourdough starter is looking fully revitalised after three days of feeding, and I baked a new loaf of bread today for the first time since returning from overseas. I added sesame, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds to this one; the first time I’ve tried a seeded loaf.

Oh, and I used the very first lime off our dwarf lime tree that we bought a few yers ago! It fruited for the first time this year, and we have three small limes. I added some fresh juice to a Thai red curry that I cooked for dinner. Growing your own ingredients is very satisfying.

New content today:

Claiming travel compensation

Today I worked some more on my previously mentioned secret project, which is approaching completion.

I also filed a request for compensation with Lufthansa over our flight that was delayed by 23 hours in Singapore. Because it was operated by a European Union airline with a destination within the EU, the EU Flight Compensation Regulation EC No 261/2004 applies, and my wife and I are entitled to compensation of 600€ each, plus reimbursement of additional expenses incurred due to the delay. So I wrote up a request for this compensation plus expenses, including details of the hotel accommodation (in the Changi Airport transit hotel), train tickets, and COVID tests that we had to pay for because our plans were disrupted. I submitted this with all of the receipts via Lufthansa’s online claim form, and have received an acknowledgement email. Let’s see how long it takes for them to process and pay out.

The main news today here in Sydney is the weather, once again. After a fairly and blissfully dry June, we have another major rain system hitting us. The rain began late last night, and today we were forecast to get up to 90 mm of rain, with another 150 mm tomorrow, and 80 mm on Monday, followed by up to 20 mm each day until Thursday. Severe weather and flood warnings have been issued. It has been raining non-stop all day, light on occasion, but often heavy. Sydney has recorded 70 mm of rain in the last 24 hours, and some suburbs are up to over 150 mm. Tomorrow is going to be much worse, with strong winds also predicted.

New content today:

This is a cold winter

I had another busy day, working on buffering up enough comics for my upcoming trip, as well as teaching face-to-face ethics with kids at the school this morning, and three online classes this evening.

There was time to take a break at lunch and walk with my wife and Scully up to the shops to get some lunchtime treats. I got some gelato just because I felt like it. Even in cold weather gelato is good.

It has been very cold for several days now. I commented to my wife that I thought the past week or two have been colder than anything we had in winter for the past two years, and she agreed. The good part though is that it’s been blissfully dry. We’ve had only 1.2 mm of rain since the start of June. It’s been bright and sunny… and things are actually starting to dry out! The huge mud puddles in all the parks are slowly getting noticeably less soggy. It’s still got a way to go, but it’s a definite improvement. Honestly, if it doesn’t rain for another month, I’d be very happy.

New content today:

Report marking

I got stuck into marking final reports for the university data engineering course today. I’ve been putting these off because I’ve been busy with other things, but the deadline is Friday, so I really need to work on these now.

And it was really cold today. The forecast temperature would have made today the 4th coldest June day in the last decade, though it got a fraction of a degree higher at 14.8°C, so I’m not sure where we ended up in those terms. But it wasn’t only cold, it was very windy, with gusts over 70 km/h for much of the day.

I went out with my wife and Scully at lunch time for a quick trip to the post office, and it was pretty miserable out there, despite the sunny sky. Leaves were swirling everywhere and small branches were scattered around having snapped off trees all over the place. Scully didn’t like it much either and raced home.

New content today:

Ethics of human rights

It’s Tuesday, which means a new topic in my online ethics classes. This week we started on human rights. I spent this morning writing the lesson. I’m using a summarised version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as the introductory story to set up the discussion. (You kind of need to know the story to understand the following, so if you don’t know it, either go spoil yourself at the linked Wikipedia article, or ignore the next paragraph.)

After summarising the story, I asked: Is the city of Omelas fair to everyone? Most of the kids this evening gave the predictable, expected answer (“No”), after which I ask them to explain why they think so. But one kid said: “Well, it depends how they pick the kid. If someone just walks down the street and picks a kid they see, then that’s not fair. But if it’s done by spinning a wheel or something, then that’s fair.” I pursued this further by asking if it was fair in the sense that everyone is treated the same? The kid said, “Well… you could make it fair if the kid was released after a month or so, and they used a different kid. So everyone would have a turn being the one who has to suffer.”

The weather here has taken a very wintry turn. Yesterday evening we had a storm front come through with 110 km/h winds, causing some minor damage across the city. Today has been very windy and bone-chillingly cold. Tomorrow is expected to be even colder and with stronger winds. Across parts of south-east Australia we’ve had snow down to altitudes as low as 600 metres, which is unusual. The good news is that there hasn’t been much rain.

In other news, our electric kettle seems to have broken. That’ll be annoying until we can get a new one. We’ll have to boil water to make tea on the stove, like savages…

New content today:

Election results and more rain

Yesterday’s election has resulted in a change of government here in Australia. The conservative Liberal Party government has been replaced by a progressive Labor Party government. It’s not fully clear yet if they’ll have a majority of seats in Parliament or will need to rely on support from the crossbench, but it’s pretty much settled that Labor will form either a majority or minority government and Anthony Albanese will be the incoming Prime Minister.

The result in my own electorate of North Sydney is very interesting, and reflects a sea change of voter opinion across many inner city electorates across the country. North Sydney has been a very safe Liberal seat, but the sitting member was ousted by an independent candidate. This is a pattern repeated in several other electorates in Sydney and other cities – female independents running on a platform of addressing climate change, unseating sitting members of a government that has been lagging badly behind the rest of the world on climate change policies. We will have a record number of independents in the new Parliament, with at least five newly elected ones joining the six who were previously there. Labor plans to address climate change, but if they need the support of these new independents to pass legislation, then they will be able to hold out for stronger action.

This is a significant change in the direction Australia has been heading. We’ve been a global laggard for the past decade due to the entrenched conservative government. Hopefully this turns a corner and we’ll start to see more responsible climate policies in the near future.

Speaking of climate, today was again miserably wet. The rainfall is forecast to last all week, in yet another bout of depressing wet weather. You can see the effects of this prolonged rainy weather in various minor news stories that keep popping up. There are so many stories about people battling mould in their homes, simply unable to to get the humidity low enough to prevent it. And today on the evening news there was a story about sports clubs facing pressure to change their membership fee rules, because of so many repeated cancellations of sporting events due to bad weather. Normally you pay a fee and there’s no refund if an event is cancelled due to weather. But many players and parents are getting increasingly annoyed at having paid fees while getting no sport at all for weeks and weeks on end.

The Bureau of Meteorology issued another mid-range forecast today, stating that we can expect higher than average rainfall to continue throughout winter (i.e. the next three months). Everyone you talk to here is is just sick of the rain and will tell you repeatedly how awful it is. There are ridiculous numbers of slugs crawling all over everything – you need to pay careful attention whenever you go out for a walk, to avoid stepping on the slugs that litter all of the footpaths.

Today I spent time doing another academic paper proofreading job. I wanted to try and finish it today, because I have lots of other work to go on with this week. Fortunately it was a conference paper and not a journal paper, so it was shorter than the previous ones I’ve done, and I managed to complete it today. I had time to take Scully for a walk, and to cook a miso-glazed baked cauliflower for dinner – one of our favourite recipes, though it takes a bit of effort.

New content today:

Gaming and Voting

Friday was wet and cold and miserable, weather-wise. After enjoying a huge 4 days without rain, we’re now in for a solid week of forecast rain. I’m pretty sure we’ve now reached the point where there’s been more rainfall in 2022 (so far!) than in any (full) year since 1996. And we’re still less than 5 months into the year. I know I keep going on about it, but it’s truly a ridiculous amount of rain we’ve had in the past few months.

And it was also freezing cold all day. The temperature never reached as high as 15°C, making it the coldest day of the year so far. Definitely an early taste of winter.

Friday evening I went to a friend’s place for board games night. My wife took Scully and the car to go visit her mother for the evening, so I took a train over.

We played a case from MicroMacro: Crime City while waiting for the sixth person to arrive. This is a very cool game that plays like a Where’s Wally? crime investigation. There’s a huge poster with an isometric drawing of dozens of city blocks, populated with thousands of tiny people. You take a set of clue cards and have to spot various things in the drawing to advance the investigation, eventually building up a sequence of events that explains a crime, implicates a suspect, and provides motive and means. It took us about 20 minutes working together peering across the map, and was a lot of fun.

After this we played a six-player round of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. Then we split into two groups of three, to play Dune Imperium and Azul: Queen’s Garden (the one I played). This is somewhat like its three predecessor games in the Azul series, but more different than any of the previous iterations, and considerably more complex. It’s the game I tried to buy last week. Now I’ve played it, I definitely want to get a copy. Following this, our subgroup of three played a game of Draftosaurus while the others finished Dune. To finish up we played a six-player game of Skull.

One of the guys gave me a lift home, so that was good – I didn’t have to catch a train around 11pm.

Today was election day, with Australia voting for the next federal government. We got up early and went to the nearest polling station, arriving soon after it opened at 8am. There was hardly any queue, maybe ten people ahead of us when we arrived.

As we waited, a guy in the queue right in front of us was hassling the staff about masks. They were handing out masks and asking everyone to wear one, but not forcing them to. And this guy was putting on a rant about how if it wasn’t compulsory he wasn’t going to do it, how he was here to “exercise his democratic right” and if the democratically elected government didn’t have a law requiring him to wear a mask then he wouldn’t.

He asked the polling booth volunteer if he had to and she started saying, “I’ve been told…” and he interrupted her with, “So you just do whatever someone tells you? Is that what you think democracy is?” I got so annoyed that I actually told him to shut up and stop hassling the staff. There should have been a security bouncer there to back her up, but this poor woman was all alone. And it probably didn’t help that she looked Indian/Sri Lankan. I bet the guy wouldn’t have been so vocal if it was a white male.

Voting done, we returned home to huddle inside out of the cold and rain all day. We only ventured out again at dinner time to go get some French galettes and crepes for dinner from a French restaurant. It’s a good place to go in cold and rainy weather, because their “outdoor” tables where we can sit with Scully are actually inside an arcade, so very well sheltered.

And now it’s time to settle in for the vote counting and watch the unfolding of how we’ll be governed fr the next three years…

New content today:

Rain and assignment marking

It continues to rain. The Sydney reddit group is just full of people complaining about the rain, being sick of the rain, dealing with rain-related problems like mould, asking when it’s finally going to stop raining, and so on.

I spent much of today huddled inside marking assignments for the data engineering course. This is the project plan for their final project, so it lays out what they propose to do, where they’re going to get their data from, what analysis techniques they will use, and the motivation for the topic they chose.

The topics are diverse, including: predicting favoured movie genres from demographic data; predicting favoured cuisine type from survey data on more general food-related behaviours; modelling performance of wind and solar power generation dependent on weather conditions; analysing traffic accident statistics in conjunction with weather data to search for correlations; modelling relationships between house prices, inflation, and interest rates over time. It’ll be interesting to see what the students come up with as conclusions for all of these projects!

New content today: