weather – dangermouse.net

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!

Cold and busy holiday Monday

Today was very cold. We had the first snowfalls of the winter on the mountains, but of course it wasn’t quite that cold here in Sydney. My wife was home because of the King’s Birthday public holiday, and when we went out to walk Scully at lunchtime I checked the temperature, which was 14°C, with wind chill making it feel like 4°C. It was very definitely very cold.

Apart from that walk I was at home teaching ethics classes. We’re finishing off the Science Fiction topic for the week, which turned out to be quite a tricky one to moderate as the teacher, and some of the questions were very challenging for some of the kids.

I also did some comics work. I still have to make another two weeks’ worth of Darths & Droids comics before I leave on my Europe trip in… less than two weeks. It’s going to come quickly and I’ll ru out of time to do all the stuff I want to do before then!

Coldest day of the year so far

It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.

I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.

This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.

The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.

Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!