weather – Page 20 – dangermouse.net

Super busy week: Friday

The day kicked off with picking up the groceries from the supermarket. Then I went for my run.

I had a little time before the ISO meeting started at 2pm. But I got a message from the new downstairs neighbour asking if Scully would like to come down and play with their dog Billie, because Billie had been cooped up because of the rain for the past few days and needed some exercise. So I said yes, because Scully also could do with some running around.

The weather, I should mention, has been dreadful the past week or so. We’ve had about 200 mm of rain in the past few days. Parts of Sydney have had more and there have been flash floods in various places. But this is peanuts compared to some places in Queensland, which have had over 300 mm of rain in just 4 hours yesterday. La Niña is walloping the east coast with crazy amounts of rain. And the forecast for Sydney for the next 7 days is heavy rain every day.

Anyway, I waited until there was a break in the rain, and then went down and we let the dogs go berserk in the yard. Which was soaking wet, littered with puddles and mud. After half an hour of playing around, the dogs were filthy. I took Scully back up and immediately gave her a bath. There was no way I could let her stay that dirty.

After bathing Scully it was straight into the ISO meeting. It was the final administrative day, and it led right up to the start of my first ethics lesson.

And after two of those, I went out with my wife and Scully for dinner. We went to the French crêpe place, which is a short drive over a couple of suburbs. The two dinner specials were a beetroot salad galette and a barbecue pulled pork galette, which we ordered. And then for dessert they had a crêpe with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, pretzels, and marshmallows. I had to try that, and it was delicious, with the crunchy pretzels adding a nice texture and hint of salt to the sweetness. A strange combination, but it worked really well.

We walked back to the car, and it was raining. And as we walked it got heavier. And heavier. And heavier. By the time we got back to the car it was pounding down. We got completely soaked climbing into the car and trying to get our umbrellas down. We drove home and had to immediately change clothes and towel off.

Now it’s virtual board games night with my friends. I’m losing as usual…

New content today:

Super busy week: Tuesday

This morning I got up and took Scully out, then had breakfast, and then went for my run. I tried to get it in early before the rain closed in, because the forecast was for a lot of rain today. I managed to get that done. The sky was dark and thundery for several hours before the rain finally arrived around lunch time.

Then the rain pounded down most of the afternoon, very heavy at times with loud rumbles of thunder, interspersed with medium rain. It’s still quite heavy now, late in the evening.

From 2pm I had the ISO Photography standards meeting, held online. One of the first agenda items was to move the first technical session from late today to early Thursday, so we ended up doing only administrative things today.

Before the ISO meeting started, I had to complete work on the new ethics class for this week, since I’ve now moved classed from Thursday evenings to Tuesdays, to give me time to attend the university for the Data Engineering course on Thursdays. But this means I have a day less in between to write up the new topic (I was often doing it on Wednesday mornings). And since the first ethics class was hard up against the end of the ISO meeting, I had to get it completed before 2pm. (Although as it turned out I had a spare hour because of the agenda change, but I didn’t know that in advance.)

For dinner I made pizza, and topped it with pumpkin and some of the bunya nuts that we’re working our way through.

They’re not crunchy like walnuts, which is what I usually use, but added a nice subtle flavour and a different texture.

And finally, in about 10 minutes, I have the second ethics class of the evening. The topic is genetic engineering, which I think will be a good one. The first class went well, and I think the kids enjoyed it a bit more than the patriotism topic.

New content today:

New running bests

On my 2.5k run today I recorded a new best time, 12:01. My current goal is to break 12 minutes, so that’s now tantalisingly close. (My previous best was 12:03.) Strava also informs me that the first mile of the run was my best time for a mile as well, 7:36 (previous best 7:38).

It was another hot day today, after the rainy weather cleared away for yesterday. We got over 30°C both day. But now in the late evening we’re sitting under a big thunderstorm, which is cooling things down again and bringing more rain. And the forecast is for more rain over the next few days. It’s been a very wet summer.

And it was another busy day of ethics classes, with 4 classes on Thursdays. The good thing about Wednesday ands Thursday being so busy is that a full half of the classes I teach are done on just those two days, and the rest of the week is a bit less intense. I had a bunch of administrative things to take care of today, with parents requesting transfers to different timeslots and sending me messages asking questions about things. I was telling my wife all the things I had to do to keep on top of it and she said, “You really have a lot of admin stuff to do with that, don’t you?”

New content today:

Wet, soggy, moist, damp

Today was all about the weather. Since my last blog entry, we’ve had almost 90 mm of rain here in Sydney. It mostly came in two large bursts, about midnight last night, and at lunchtime today. I heard the heavy rain in the night. The midday rain was amazing – it was absolutely torrential for about half an hour, with heavy rumbles of thunder.

I took a photo, but this was after the peak, when the rain had eased off a bit:

By 2pm or so the rain had eased to a sprinkle, but the weather radar implied that we’d be getting more later, so I went out for my run, and just got wet. I didn’t have time to do it in the morning because I had two ethics classes, at 9am and then 11am. And this evening I have two as well, 6pm and 9pm. The 9am class is a new one, that a parent requested because none of the available time slots were suitable. This is the first time I’ve been doing 4 classes in one day, and it’s a bit exhausting, and doesn’t leave time for much else.

In between the morning classes, I took some time to go down to the garage and clean off some of the mould that I’d found growing down there the other day. Disgusting stuff, but alas inevitable in this sort of tropical humidity we’ve been having for over a month now. I installed the damp removers in the garage cupboards – hopefully that will keep things under control from now on.

This evening my wife found a leech in our living room! A leech! That’s how wet it is! I suspect what happened is that during the walk I took Scully on around 5pm, after all of the rain, she picked up the leech while walking through the wet grass. And then once we got inside it dropped off after getting a taste of her anti-parasite treatment. My wife caught the offending annelid in a tissue and we disposed of it before it could attach to a human.

New content today:

Relentless humidity

After I went to bed last night following virtual board games night, a huge storm broke. I was drifting off to sleep when it began: pounding rain, lightning, and thunder. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was a while.

This morning I slept in a little, then got up, had breakfast, and went for my 2.5k run. I really thought I was doing a god time, pushing myself a little, and getting really exhausted by the end of it. But the clock told me it wasn’t that great. It just probably felt more exhausting because it was 24°C and 94% humidity.

The maximum temperature today was just over 30°C, but it was steamy humidity all day. And then there was another storm late this afternoon, although the most intense part swept just north of me and we only saw the edge of it. We go some moderate rain for half an hour or so. And then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again, baking the moisture back out of the ground. It’s 9pm now and it’s over 90% humidity again. And this is the way it’s been pretty much all this week. I really wouldn’t mind if it got hotter, if only the humidity would go down a bit. (Of course, in a summer or two, I’ll be complaining about the 42+°C temperatures and skin-cracking 5% humidities…)

I don’t think I mentioned the other day that when working on that tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting, I actually scribbled out a couple of pages of calculus and was using Matlab to figure out some things. I’m just reminded now because I have the pages sitting next to me here in the desk.

Scully got to go out today with an old friend – Bella the dog who she has stayed with a couple of times when we’ve gone on holidays. Bella belongs to friends of ours, and one of them came over with Bella and one of the kids to visit for a bit.

New content today:

Summer humidity

The weather has been ridiculously humid lately. We’ve been having temperatures around 30°C, and humidities hovering in the 80-100% range. WIth some occasional rain to really drive home the humidity. This is in contrast to the summer of a couple of years ago, when we had much hotter and drier conditions. La Niña is causing this current warm (but not hot) and humid phase. It’s meaning I’m finishing my 2.5k runs every morning completely dripping in sweat.

Today: more ethics teaching, another 3 classes, and more Darths & Droids production.

New content today:

Delivery trek across Sydney

My wife got an order for a dog bandana from her Etsy shop this morning, from a customer who wanted it delivered in time for New Year’s Eve. They live in Sydney, and wanted to know if they could pick it up. But my wife decided we could drive over and deliver it, and take the opportunity for a day out and grabbing some lunch somewhere. I found a good looking pie bakery not far from the delivery address, so we set out.

We made the delivery, and then drove over to the bakery. It began raining heavily while we drove, and when we got there and found a parking place we sat in the car for several minutes to avoid getting soaked. I could see on the radar (on my phone) that it was a passing shower, so we waited it out. Eventually it stopped and we went out to go around the corner to the bakery…

And it was closed! It said online that it’s open 24/7, which is really unusual for any business in Sydney. But I guess that doesn’t include public holidays. (Today is the Boxing Day public holiday, held over from Sunday since both Christmas and Boxing Day occurred on the weekend. Monday was the Christmas public holiday.)

So, anyway, we just headed back home for a late lunch. Through intermittent heavy rain.

Besides an early evening dog walk, and my regular run, I mostly worked on Darths & Droids today. I wanted to complete three new strips, and just finished a few minutes ago… phew.

New content today:

And relax into Boxing Day…

Boxing Day is the traditional day for consuming Christmas leftovers, and tuning in to watch the opening day of the Melbourne Test match. England are here and have lost the opening two games of the Ashes series in dismal displays, so it’s really just a matter of seeing if Australia can manage a 5-0 whitewash at this stage. And given England’s batting performance today, I’d say that’s a strong chance.

It was also the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, which was cancelled last year for this first time in its history due to COVID. So it’s an exciting event with everyone having missed last year. It’s going to be a very tough first night for the boats sailing down the coast, as they’re heading into the teeth of storms sweeping up from the south.

Those storms have turned yesterday’s hot and sunny Christmas Day into a cool, cloudy, and soon to be rainy Boxing Day.

I didn’t do a whole lot today – walked Scully, did some exercising, reviewed some of the Darths & Droids story planning notes.

New content today:

Pre-Christmas market day

Today was the first time the East Lindfield markets were held since July, the last few having been cancelled due to COVID restrictions. My wife and I figured it would be a good day, being close to Christmas, and hopefully a good number of people would be out shopping.

I got up and had a quick breakfast before packing the car and heading over to the market site. As usual, I need to make two trips because we have a small car, and after unloading the stuff I returned home to pick up my wife, Scully, and the remainder of the gear. We had our stall set up and ready to go about 20 minutes before the official starting time of 9 o’clock.

The day was hot, really hot. I heard on the news this evening that it was the hottest day since January (last summer). It felt really humid too, although checking the humidity later when I got home it was only around 50% for most of the day. Fortunately, we had an indoor stall, and the community centre we were in had recently renovated and installed air conditioning, so it was fairly pleasant where we were. But all of the people with outdoor stalls under marquees must have been sweltering.

But there were a good number of customers coming through today, which was nice. We didn’t sell a lot of stuff, but we made a profit above the stall rental fee, and handed out a bunch of business cards. And by the time we got home again, my wife actually got an order on Etsy for 3 dog bandanas from one of the women she’d given a business card to, so that sort of counts as well. And it was nice to see some of the familiar faces of the other stallholders there, after so many months of cancellations. So overall it was a decent and positive day.

The hot weather broke into a storm as I was making my second trip home with our stuff. We got a few minutes of heavy rain, but the storm had merely skirted us, and as we discovered when watching the evening news it had caused havoc further north, tearing rooves off buildings, bringing down power lines and trees, destroying cars, and killing a person. The news footage was really quite scary. Another storm front come through later and we got very strong winds here and heavy rain, but I don’t see any damage from our windows.

This evening it’s time to relax, after a busy and exhausting day!

New content today:

It almost didn’t rain today

It was actually sunny for much of today, although not very hot – there was a chilly wind blowing for much of the day. I got stuck into writing and making some new Darths & Droids comics.

Besides my now usual 2.5k run, I went out later in the afternoon to take Scully for a walk. It was sunny when we left, but 15 minutes later it was raining! Fortunately it wasn’t too heavy and we didn’t get too wet.

I’ve also been playing a lot with artflow.ai, a website that generates portraits from text descriptions. It’s a lot of fun, and my friends and I have been having fun making blended portraits, such as:

Bilbo Baggins played by Harry Potter:

Bilbo Baggins played by Harry Potter

Or Gandalf played by Queen Elizabeth II:

Gandalf played by Queen Elizabeth II

New content today: