weather – Page 11 – dangermouse.net

Busy day, weather ramping up

Thursday is teaching five online classes, leaving not so much time for other things. I took Scully for a longer walk early, before the day heated up too much, since the forecast was hot. I did my first lesson for the older kids on the topic of Employment, which went fairly well. The younger kids with the Gift Giving topic is a bit more fun. I had some interestingly varied responses today to the question of what to do with a gift that you find disappointing. Many kids say you should keep it anyway, but one this evening said you should sell it and use the money to buy something you like, since the giver would expect you to get some enjoyment out of it!

The heat is ramping up here for a forecast 40°C scorcher tomorrow, bang on time for the Australia Day public holiday (more about which tomorrow when I have more time to write). But there’s also concerns about Tropical Cyclone Kirrily, which was predicted yesterday to hit Townsville as a low range category 2 storm, but which today unexpectedly intensified to category 3, and which should be making landfall within the hour as I type. There are over 20,000 customers without power already, and repairs will take days after the storm. Over a metre of rain is forecast. Hopefully everyone up there will be safe.

New content today:

Not in hot water

Today I had a maintenance guy from the gas company come around to replace our hot water meter. This is a periodic thing they do every 7 years for all customers, to ensure the meters are up to date and working properly. They gave me a window of 10:00-12:00 when the guy would arrive. Of course, there was no sign of him until almost 12:30. Then it took half an hour to do the job. Meanwhile I was hoping that Scully didn’t suddenly need to go out for a toilet, as I would have had to ask the worker to leave while I took Scully out. I don’t want a stranger in our home while nobody else is in here.

But Scully was fine, and after the guy finished replacing the meter we went out for a walk. The morning was cool and cloudy, with heavy rain from about 6am to 9am. It cleared up, and by the afternoon it was warm and sunny, though not too hot. The next three days however are forecast to be heatwave conditions, with temperatures around 40°C across parts of Sydney.

There’s also the tropical low off Queensland which is expected to be declared Tropical Cyclone Kirrily some time tonight. It’s still tracking to hit Townsville, and forecast to dump over a meter of rain the next few days to a wide area still recovering from widespread heavy flooding.

I spent much of the day writing new lessons for the new week of ethics classes. I have split topics for the two age groups this week: Gift Giving for 10-12, and Employment for 13-15. I managed to complete both of them by mid-afternoon, which is really good going. I also cleaned up the laundry a bit since that’s where the hot water meter is, and threw out some old cleaning products that we were unlikely to use. So that felt pretty productive.

For diner tonight I made calzones, filled with broccoli, pumpkin, and ricotta. Topped with a chilli and garlic tomato sauce, they were really good.

New content today:

Hottest day of the year (so far)

It’s all about the weather at the moment. Sydney had its hottest day of 2024 so far today, reaching 40°C in some suburbs. But it was cooler near the coast, only reaching about 34°C here, thankfully. Western Australia has been suffering an even worse heatwave, with the town of Paraburdoo reaching a record 47.9°C today, and predicted to be around the same tomorrow.

The other weather of interest is a tropical low system off the coast of Queensland, which is forecast to develop into a cyclone of at least category 3 strength, and will probably make landfall somewhere around the city of Townsville late in the week. This means more torrential rain for northern Queensland, which is still suffering flooding from ridiculous amounts of rain over the past few weeks. It seems like they can’t get a break up there.

Today I basically stayed indoors in the cool of the air conditioning. I took Scully for a short walk in the middle of the day, not going very far. It’s also tricky because the roads and footpaths are baking hot in the sun and I have to keep picked her up to go over areas with no shade, to avoid burning her paws. She’s not keen on that and wriggles to be put down, despite the hot surfaces.

I finished off writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic!, and photographed some of them, but not all of them. I wanted to quickly make enough for this coming week, and will finish off photographing the rest of the batch during the week.

My ankle is still a bit sore, but seems to be feeling better today. I didn’t go running, to give it a chance to recover. Also it would have been awful running in this weather! So in a way it was nice to have an excuse not to.

New content today:

I’m ready for this humidity to end

This weather is so tiresome… it’s just so humid every day. Temperatures aren’t so bad, getting up around 30°C in the middle of the day, but the darn humidity is pretty much pegged on 100% all night, and only drops to around 70% in the heat of the day. Overnight rain doesn’t help at all as it simply steams up the air the next day when it heats up. I checked the past few days and the humidity hasn’t dropped below about 70% at any time for the at least the past four days. Probably longer, as that’s as far back as the detailed hour-by-hour records go on the Bureau of Meteorology website. So I’m just spending as much time as I can at home with the air conditioner either on cool (in the middle of the day) or dehumidify mode (in the morning and night).

I did take Scully out for a couple of walks, because of course she needs the exercise. At lunch we went up to the fish & chip shop, which has reopened this week after an extended closure over Christmas. I got my usual choice and we went to the high park overlooking the harbour to eat (as opposed to the low park down by the waterside, which is a bit further away).

Apart from that, 5 ethics classes today, and a bit of comics work, and that was pretty much it.

New content today:

Spinal update and heavy rain

This morning I worked on some more Darths & Droids writing. It never ends!

After lunch I had an appointment with my neurologist, following up on the spinal injection procedure I had before Christmas. The numbness in my left leg seems to have been partly relieved by the injection, improving slowly over the past few weeks. I’d say it’s about 50% back towards full sensation now, so a noticeable improvement, but still not back to normal. I told the neurologist this, and she said that this showed that it was indeed the L3 nerve causing the issue. Which is a good thing, because it’s not something else that might indicate more severe problems. She said at this stage the most sensible option is just “wait and see”. It might slowly deteriorate again over the next few years. She also said that if I notice any other symptoms like tingling or numbness anywhere else in the body, I should get it checked up straight away. But for now it seems there’s no serious ongoing issue, as it’s simply minor loss of sensation, with a pinpointed cause, and no effect on any muscles.

And as a bonus, she didn’t even charge me anything for the consultation!

I walked back home via my wife’s work to pick up Scully and take her home. I wanted to hurry a bit because there was incoming rain on the weather radar, to get home before it hit. We made it, and it’s a good thing because it really set in. It’s been raining steadily, sometimes heavy, for the past several hours. It won’t be fun later when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toileting. I use a big umbrella and try to stand over her to shelter her from getting too wet, but inevitably there’s some towelling off when we get back inside. It’s been a ridiculously wet summer so far, and seems to just be rolling on. All over Eastern Australia – there are ongoing flood issues both north in Queensland and south in Victoria, but we seem to have missed most of the major floods so far.

I made fried rice for dinner. We were out of the usual vegetables like broccoli and carrots, so I did it with a lot of celery and some chopped Brussels sprouts, which seemed to work okay.

And tonight was the first three classes of my “Minor Laws” ethics topic. I had some interesting discussion with some of the kids, and quite varying opinions on whether it’s okay or not to break laws that thousands of people break every day without caring about it.

New content today:

Very rainy cabin fever

Rain came in overnight and it was very, very heavy. It woke me up a couple of times during the night. We recorded over 60 mm in the city centre, and up to 150 mm in some inland suburbs. It continued into late morning, so I didn’t take Scully for an early walk – we just ducked outside quickly for her toileting and then she wanted to run back inside. She’s not keen on rain.

I had 4 classes, and worked on Darths & Droids scripts a bit. For dinner I made pastry for quiche, and decided to try it with finely chopped celery (since we have a lot of celery at the moment) and I also added some nutmeg. It turned out all right.

My wife and I took Scully for a longer walk in the evening, when the rain had stopped, although it was still very grey. Not an especially interesting Monday, I’m afraid!

New content today:

Another humid day, and games night

Today was another very warm and humid day, similar to but not quite as bad as yesterday. It was very cloudy early, keeping all that moisture in. In fact it rained unexpectedly when I went out to pick up the weekly grocery shopping, quite heavily. When the clouds cleared and the sun came out it just got more steamy.

I did another four ethics classes today on the “Future of Sports” topic. Most of the kids are very sceptical of the idea of robots playing sports with or against humans. Even when I’m very careful to specify that the robots have the same skill as a human player, they often bring up the idea that it’s unfair and the robots will have an advantage.

Tonight is games night. It was supposed to be in person at a friend’s place, but the host came down with a bout of gastro and was vomiting, so we converted it into an online event tonight. I’ve had a poor night so far, losing a game of Ticket to Ride and two of Jump Drive. And I’m currently way behind in a game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal.

New content today:

A record humid weather day

The main talking point today was how ridiculously humid the weather was. The temperature here in Sydney only got up to 30.8°C, but the humidity was so high all day that it was a major topic of discussion with both my friends and also people in the community. We recorded a dew point temperature of 25.9°C, which set a new record for the highest dew point ever recorded in Sydney. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us that dew points above 24°C are considered “oppressive”.

It sure felt that way. I took Scully out for a leisurely 15 minute walk around the block at 8am, not strenuous in any way – we were in fact dawdling along as you do when your dog is sniffing everything. But by the time we got home I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was saturated. It was similar taking her out for a short walk at lunch time. So I’ve been sitting indoors the rest of the day with the air conditioning on, mainly to take the humidity out of the air, not so much to cool it down.

The cicadas have also been going bananas all day, because apparently they love this sort of hot and sticky tropical weather. This is the loudest summer of cicadas I can remember for several years. We don’t have the Magicicada type of periodical cicadas that North America has, so there isn’t a regular cycle of them. I don’t know what controls the numbers but it varies from year to year in an unpredictable way.

I had five ethics classes today. In between I worked a bit on making a new adventure for Professor Plums, the science shop where I’ve been running Dungeons & Dragons occasionally on Saturday nights. But for something different I’m going to run a science fiction game set in the Star Wars universe. But I’m not going to use any of the Star Wars roleplaying games (I have both the WEG d6 one and Genesys system one) – I’m going to use the rules from Scum & Villainy, a Forged in the Dark game system based on Blades in the Dark. The idea is to give the players, who have pretty much done exclusively D&D 5th Edition, a taste of a different genre and a different game system.

New content today:

Christmas lunch and storms

Christmas Day and Scully was up early to see what Santa brought her! She liked her new toy from her buddy Luna.

I had a job: To make the glazed ham. I prepared the ham and then mixed up some orange marmalade with brown sugar and ground cloves. I spread the glaze mix over the ham, and covered it with thin orange slices, held on by toothpicks.

Then baked the lot on a low oven for 45 minutes, basting it a couple of times with the juices.

It turned out really nice, and everyone who had some at lunch liked it. There was also the traditional turkey, roast vegetables, and other stuff. Followed by Christmas pudding and ice cream. It was all delicious, and even though it’s dinner time now I don’t really feel like eating anything.

Normally Christmas Day is hot and sunny, but today it was mild and the clouds came over just after lunch. Storms were on the way. Parts of New South Wales west of Sydney reported tennis-ball sized hail as severe thunderstorms rolled eastward towards the coast. We left earlier than we usually do, to try to beat the storms home. I didn’t fancy having our car out on the street with giant hailstones falling from the sky. We made it home as the rain started, but so far the bad storms have passed either north or south of us. We’ll see how the evening pans out.

New content today:

Christmas Eve lunch with family

It’s Christmas Eve! Scully was super excited when she woke up, because that means it’s only five more sleeps until Christmas!

(counting her various morning and afternoon naps)

Today we had plans for lunch with my mother, brother, and stepfather. We drove up to Gosford, a bit over an hour north of home. The weather forecast was for thunderstorms, and we got some intermittently while driving up on the freeway, and also later during lunch. We met at a pizza place that my mother likes, and sat outside at a table under shelter, so that was fine. The pizzas were pretty good, and we caught up on a lot of things. I don’t see my mother or brother that often, so we had plenty of stories to tell about our trip to Europe.

When we got home we walked up to the supermarket to get some corn chips to make a simple dinner of nachos after the big lunch.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day of course, and we’re heading to my wife’s family for lunch. I need to make the glazed ham in the morning. This year I’m trying an orange marmalade glaze.

The weather is going to be interesting though. The forecast is for severe thunderstorms, with possible hail. I’m really hoping we don’t get hail, because our car will be parked out on the street all day there. I won’t take my traditional after-lunch swim in the harbour, because the water will be murky with the recent rain, which can be dangerous because of bacteria and also increases the risk of sharks.

New content today: