weather – Page 10 – dangermouse.net

The Kickstarter that keeps on giving

Back in 2015 I backed a Kickstarter for a copy of the roleplaying game Delta Green. I got the book many years ago, but they keep on issuing new digital rewards for backers. I got another one yesterday – this is about the 20th or 30th PDF adventure/expansion that I’ve received for this project. And the announcement email said they’re still working on four more titles that I should receive in the future! This is not stuff that was promised and they’re late in delivering – it’s all bonus rewards that I never expected to get in the first place. Definitely a publisher that looks after its customers.

Oh, the other main news is all about the weather. We had 111 mm of rain overnight, and today’s forecast was upgraded from another 100 mm to 200 mm! The morning was steady rain, a little heavy at times, but nothing too bad. It increased in the afternoon and is expected to get very heavy overnight, until late tomorrow morning.

Board games night is at a friend’s place, but I decided not to go tonight. A combination of the traffic and heavy rain, and wanting to get some things done at home. I needed to complete next week’s ethics class topic plan early, because on Tuesday I’m planning to have a day out in the mountains with an Internet acquaintance who is visiting Sydney from the USA. He actually arrived late yesterday, just in time for this glorious stormy welcome.

New content today:

Sydney putting on the weather for a visitor

I have an online acquaintance who is currently visiting Australia for the first time. He began his trip in Melbourne last week, and spent the last four days driving along the scenic coastal route to Sydney, taking his time to enjoy the sights. He hauled into Sydney this afternoon… just in time for the start of one of our epic weather events.

The forecast is for almost 200mm of rain over the next 48 hours, with some thunderstorms and high winds thrown in for good measure. The Nepean/Hawkesbury River system that marks the western and northern boundaries of Sydney has had a “minor to major” flood warning issued. The ran started at lunch time today and was light during the afternoon, but it’s getting pretty heavy now in the evening.

This morning I had two ethics classes, and thenI tried to beat the incoming rain and send another package off at the post office. I managed to get as far as halfway home via the pie shop, where I grabbed some lunch. I took shelter on some covered seating at a nearby park to eat with Scully while we watched the rain come down. It lightened up a bit and we didn’t get too wet on the way home.

In the afternoon I did some comics stuff and prepped for this evening’s three further ethics classes. Oh, I also added a new class time on Monday nights to cater to a couple of students who needed to move from existing classes for scheduling reasons. I’m getting a bit saturated with classes, but felt I could handle one more for two long-time students.

New content today:

Weather forecast got it wrong

Yep, the Bureau of Meteorology got today’s forecast very wrong. It was supposed to be hot and sunny, 29°C. It briefly reached 25°C and hovered closer to 20°C for most of the day, under grey skies and some heavy rain.

I took Scully for a bit of a drive at lunch time, and we got caught out by the rain. I had to find a seat under shelter to eat after getting a couple of pies from the Allambie Pies shop. Scully’s not keen on rain, so she didn’t want to run around in it at the park there.

No progress on the jigsaw puzzle today, as I said I wouldn’t work on it while my wife was out at work. And then when she got home, I went for a 5k run, and then when I got home from that she went out to a Zumba aerobics class. And she brought home a copy of The Barbie Movie from the library to watch, so she’s watching that this evening.

I worked on my ethics class for this week, on the topic of Persuasion. I point out that persuading people is attempting to change their minds about something, and explore the ethics of when that’s okay, and when it’s not okay. And how people persuade others, what methods do they use, and are some methods more effective, or more ethical, than others.

And I spent some time tidying up a bunch of loose ends and tasks that needed to get done. Nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy – just mundane chores.

New content today:

Enjoying the cooler weather

Oh, it’s so nice after the summer. It rained heavily overnight and was nice and cool today, with a few light showers. Also I noticed for the first time the ginkgo trees outside are just starting to turn yellow in a few of the leaves, the first real sign of autumn. They’re beautiful in mid-autumn when all the leaves are bright butter yellow. (Before they fall off and make a mess everywhere.)

I spent some time photographing piles of Magic: the Gathering cards before packing them for mailing this week. But mostly I worked on writing new Darths & Droids comics and making them up, trying to get a bit ahead of the publishing schedule. I also did some housework – getting the quilt out of storage and putting it back on the bed, since the nights are cooling down enough that a single sheet might not be warm enough soon. And I cleaned the bathroom and shower, and made some sourdough bread.

My wife spent some time today doing a one-day indigo dyeing course. She came home with about ten bits of cloth all died in different interesting patterns. She’s going to hem some and turn them into scarves. She said it as really fun to do. Next weekend she’s doing another class, on felt making.

Finally, if you want a puzzle challenge, try to work out the name of this restaurant this recently opened near me, from this logo.

I walked past it the other day and couldn’t figure it out until I went up and looked at one of the menus, which had the name written in a normal font. I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

New content today:

And so into autumn…

Friday was the first day of autumn, and thank goodness we have some cooler weather to look forward to soon. Friday was actually cooler than Thursday, but still plenty warm and very humid. I had four ethics classes during the day and I took Scully on a couple of short walks.

The Confession topic with the older kids is very interesting. It’s mostly about confession for things like crimes, breaking parental rules, or embarrassing secrets. But I touch on Catholic confession as a ritual of the church, describe it, and ask the kids what they think of it. The first two classes I had with this topic the kids all agreed that it is a useful thing to confess your misdeeds/sins and then have to show repentance and think about them, as it makes you more mindful of doing bad things and can make you a better person. But in Friday’s class I asked the same question and both of the kids in the class said it was rubbish, that it’s basically a get-out-of-jail-free card with God, you just get forgiven and go do bad things again without consequence.

Friday evening was online games night with my friends. We played a bunch of the usual suspect board games. My wife went out for dinner with some of her friends, so I had leftover fried rice from the night before, and I went up with Scully to the fish & chip shop to buy some fresh prawns to add to it.

Friday night was oppressive. The overnight minimum temperature was about 25°C, with humidity in the 90s, and a “feels like” temperature close to 30°C. By the time I got up and went for my 5k run, it was basically the same, and it was awful to run in – breathing felt like inhaling hot soup.

Today I stayed inside with the air conditioning and worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts. I managed to get that done, but will have to photograph it tomorrow or Monday.

For dinner we all went out for a short drive to Lane Cove shops and found a Mexican place there. The food was good, but a bit expensive. We were sitting next to a grassy area where lots of kids were playing, and there was a DJ playing music on a small stage. It was kind of fun, but a little noisy with everything happening.

New content today:

Last day of summer heat

29 February, leap year day! Also the last day of summer, and Sydney really turned it on for the occasion. We reached over 40°C in some suburbs, although nearer the coast it was thankfully a few degrees cooler. I took Scully for a walk in the morning before it got too hot, but it was hot and humid enough to be uncomfortable. At lunch I just took her out briefly and kept our short walk in the shade of the trees. We went out at the same time as our new neighbour with their dog Sophie, and the two dogs are getting along pretty well, keen to see each other and wagging tails in a friendly manner. They seem to want to play, but so far the neighbours have always kept Sophie on a lead. We let Scully off in the park across the street sometimes so she can play with other dogs, but the neighbours might not be confident enough to do that.

I had 5 ethics classes today, 4 with the younger groups and one on the new Confession topic with older kids. That went well, and generated some very interesting discussion.

For dinner I made fried rice. And I spent a bit of time in the afternoon trying to write new Irregular Webcomic! strips, but I was struggling to come up with ideas and it didn’t go very well. Also perhaps because it was such a warm day and even with the air conditioning on it made me feel a bit lethargic.

New content today:

A Monday off, sort of

I had nothing on my calendar for today. I used the time to work on a bunch of new comics for Darths & Droids. I wrote four strips, with help from co-authors, and made two of them. I could make another but it’s getting late.

The main exciting thing about today was the weather. The morning began thickly overcast, warming up with a stifling humidity. I took Scully for a walk at 08:30, and by the time we got home I had to change my shirt because it was soaked through with sweat.

The storm rolled in at midday. Thunder and lightning cracked across the sky. And then the rain pelted down. The gutters here overflowed within minutes, sending great sheets of water down past my windows. It was torrential. It eased off to steady hard rain, but intensified again and varied back and forth for about three hours. We recorded almost 30 mm of rain in those three hours. The storm caused flash flooding across the city.

There was a lot of lightning – the evening news said 75,000 strikes were recorded in the Sydney area. One of my friends’ office building was struck, shorting all the power including the lifts, doors, and fire panels. Nearly 20,000 homes were blacked out. And four people were struck by lighting and are now in serious condition in hospital. There were a couple of cracks of thunder that must have been lightning striking very close to my home.

It eased off later in the afternoon, and I managed to take Scully for a walk about 4:30pm, in just light rain. The creek in the park across the road was roaring with water. Normally it’s nothing more than a trickle. I wondered if our garage would have flooded again, but we’ve had new water pumps installed after the last time, and while there were some small pools in places there was no flooding.

I didn’t have any work for the day, but I did have to deal with a bunch of administrative emails from Outschool parents and kids, asking if there was a class today – they must have missed/forgotten the news that there were no classes this week. I had one ask for a refund for the missing class, unaware that they’d paid a week in advance for next week’s class, and last week they hadn’t been charged for this week’s (missing) one.

For dinner I made pizza with zucchini flowers that my wife had bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

New content today:

Mango weather

Last night was very warm, 25°C minimum temperature, with close to 100% humidity. We slept with the air conditioner on, which we never normally do. It would have been an awful sleepless night otherwise. The day warmed up slowly since it was overcast, but midday was around 34°C and so humid that the “feels like” was almost 40°C. I just stayed indoors as much as possible and only took Scully out for necessary toilet breaks.

I finished off the “Hoaxes” ethics classes today. I’ve started work on the next week’s topic, which is “Why?” – examining the idea of seeking reasons for everything. That one should be interesting.

After my last class we had a mango for dessert – a new variety that we haven’t tried before I keep tasting notes on all the different mango varieties, and this is the tenth one, a new variety here in Australia called Scarlet Delight. My tasting notes: Smallish, red skin. Firm smooth flesh, rich tropical orange-passionfruit flavour. Small seed with not much hair.

Not much else to say. I’m just relaxing now and waiting for this overnight cool change to come through. Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler and rainy.

New content today:

Writing about hoaxes

Wow, it was horrible during the night. The temperature barely got below 25°C – the minimum was 24.2°C at 2:30 am, and then it started warming up again. And it was nudging 100% humidity. Even though we had the air conditioner on all evening and turned it off just before bedtime, by 3 am it was so warm that my wife couldn’t sleep and we had to turn it on again.

The day barely got any hotter, reaching only 27°C, but the humidity was oppressive all day, with showers adding to the steamy moisture in the air. It should be a little cooler tonight but it’s ramping up to be a sticky, uncomfortable week ahead, with overnight minimums of 26°C to look forward to.

In other great climate news, the Bureau of Meteorology tells us that the current El Niño conditions are likely to end by June and head back towards another La Niña, the 4th in 5 years. Which means yet another cool, wet summer in store next summer. I was really hoping this summer would dry things out with some nice dry weather, but El Niño hasn’t even delivered that. Apparently the ocean temperatures are at record highs, resulting in a lot more evaporation, and humid air being blown over eastern Australia. I suppose this is probably the pattern as we move into the climate change future.

Today I wrote the coming week’s ethics class, on the topic of Hoaxes. I’m using a few well-known historical hoaxes to prompt questions: the Cottingley Fairies, Cardiff Giant, Great Blue Hill eruption prank, and Helicopter Shark. These run a nice gamut of reasons why people create hoaxes, why people fall for them, how they propagate, consequences of them, and how modern technology enables hoaxes, which we can discuss during the class. Should be a fun topic, starting tomorrow.

Finally, in a slight administrative issue, I did write a post last night, but when I scheduled it to publish just after my comics updated a bit later in the evening, I somehow accidentally changed the scheduled publish date from January to December, so it never auto-published! I’ve pushed it out manually now, which is why you may be seeing two updates at once today.

New content today:

Scorching hot Australia Day

It’s Australia Day, our national public holiday. But as every year, the debate and controversy over the day intensifies. I feel like it’s reached a point where it’s so uncomfortable for so many people that there’s no way the holiday can be saved. For years we’ve had a significant portion of the population campaigning to change the date away from 26 January. This time there’s now a noticeable shift and people calling for the holiday to be abolished altogether. Perhaps replaced with something else, but no ongoing holiday called “Australia Day”, even if it is moved to a different date.

Honestly, the momentum is so high and growing every year, that I truly think it’s just a matter of time. It’s predominantly older, conservative people who want to keep Australia Day as it is. The growing number of young people who have more progressive views on Australia’s colonial history are going to be the majority before too much longer, and it will be inevitable that the holiday is moved or changed or abolished.

I kind of wish it would happen sooner rather than later because the day has just become an uncomfortable thing that happens every year and people argue about it, or don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s really reached the point where our national day has devolved into almost what would be a parodic joke if it wasn’t for the fact that so many people find it genuinely offensive.

Besides the political heat over the day and what it means, it was physically hot. We reached 38.5°C in Sydney, over 40°C in some suburbs. But the temperature dropped 10 degrees in half an hour in mid-afternoon as a southerly wind came in.

My wife had a day off work for the public holiday, but I did my normal 4 online classes. We’re going to take Scully for a longer walk this evening in the cooler air as the sun goes down, and then maybe play some board games later in the evening.

New content today: