Heavy rain and heavy lunch

Aldi advertised a special item available today – a dog bed. We’ve got two of the dog beds from there and Scully loves them, but she’s also chewed them a bit so they have some holes, so we wanted to get another. I drove over to the nearest Aldi store to pick one up this morning, but they didn’t have any.

For lunch, I caught a train to Newtown, where I met my brother. We had lunch together at The Pie Tin. He’d never been there before, so I recommended some of the best pies for him to try – he chose the barbecue brisket and a sausage roll. I had a Nepali curry lamb and a Mexican chicken. We were both really full, but it’s worth it since the pies there are so good.

ON the way home, I stopped off at Town hall to check out the game shop and see if they had a copy of Azul: Queen’s Garden. They didn’t. I then stopped again at North Sydney to pop into the Aldi there and see if they had the dog bed. They didn’t.

Oh, and it’s been raining almost all day. Heavy rain. We had a lot of rain overnight. There was a break in the early afternoon, but it’s now raining heavily again this evening. Everyone in Sydney is so sick of this endless rain.

The rain on the train

New content today:

Here comes the rain again

It’s cold and it’s rainy. We had a good run of 7 days in a row without rain, but it’s back, and the forecast is rain for at least the next 7 days in a row.

It stopped late in the afternoon and I took Scully to the dog park to say hi to everyone, since we haven’t been there for a few weeks. But when time came to do the traditional walk at 4pm, drops began falling, and there was heavy rain incoming on the radar – and I’d neglected to bring an umbrella – so we beat a hasty retreat back to the car to head home.

I finished off the ethics of farming topic today. And I worked on some secret project stuff.

Tonight I have a Zoom meeting to discuss the agenda and dates of the upcoming ISO Photography standards meeting in Cologne. That begins at 11pm, so I need to stay up late. This will finalise the dates for the Cologne meeting, so I can then book hotels in Cologne and onward into the Netherlands following the meeting. It’s also to decide if we will actually have a face-to-face meeting or will convert it into an online virtual meeting, but I expect we’ll stay with the face-to-face.

New content today:

More rain, more running

I’ve been slacking a little with my exercise, so I made sure to do a 2.5k run today. The last couple I’ve done have been slow, getting up to 12:30, so today I pushed myself hard trying to get a better time and was happy with the result of 11:52.

I did it in between some heavy showers of rain, which have been sweeping across the city all day. We’re in yet another rainy spell – it’s rained every day for the past week now. Although the falls haven’t been as heavy as we had a month or so ago, just a few millimetres every day.

I was back at the school this morning for my face-to-face ethics class. The class was… astonishingly well behaved today. It was quite eerie really. I think I only had to ask some kids to stop having a private chat and pay attention once, which is amazing. They were almost spookily quiet. Which was nice, but on the negative side, it seemed like not as many of them were actually keen to raise their hands and discuss the questions we were talking about. Most of the answering was being done by just two of the girls, while everyone else was just sitting there silently.

Next week’s class is cancelled due to a teacher’s strike that has been called for next Wednesday. Even if that hadn’t happened (or is called off at the last minute), the school had planned to have its cross country carnival that day, so there’d be no class anyway. So I have next week off from that.

New content today:

Evolutionary Sunday

Today I had another science lesson online with the girl who has been taking those intermittently. Last time we began talking about evolution, and today was the second half of that topic. I prepared some slides showing the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin, finch beaks, hybridisation (lions and tigers crossbreeding to produce ligers), induced speciation in fruit flies, evolution of apes, and whales, and horses, and something about the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It was a fun class and the student seemed to really enjoy it.

The weather here has turned slightly chilly as we get deep into autumn and start thinking about winter. We’ve had nice sunny days, although with some overnight rain just to keep things damp, but the maximum temperatures have been in the low 20s Celsius, which is noticeably cooler than the past months. And the nights have been getting quite chilly, down around 14°C, which feels like a big change from the overnight lows of 18°C we were getting a few weeks ago. 18°C is comfortable – I was taking Scully out around 10pm for her final toilet in just shorts and a T-shirt, but now I’m having to wear long pants and a jacket to do it.

We took Scully for another walk and ball chasing episode just after lunch, this time down to the nearest ferry wharf and the secluded adjacent park. The park is in a bowl-shaped hollow leading down to the water, so it took some care throwing the tennis ball so that it wouldn’t roll down into the harbour.

Um. I guess it wasn’t an especially interesting day, apart from thinking about evolution a bit.

New content today:

Kitchen cleaning

Today was a beautiful day – I think the last gasp of summer. We’ve had four days in a row with no rain. That hasn’t happened since mid-February, over two months ago. And the temperature got warmer over those days, reaching 29.2°C today.

However, I say it’s the last gasp, because a storm is closing in tonight and the next seven days are forecast to be cooler and rainy every day. EDIT: I realised with the storm about to hit here any second, today won’t be a rainless day, meaning we’ve only had three days in a row of no rain.

incoming storm radar image

More housework today. I cleaned off all the kitchen counters of all the clutter (breakfast cereal, chopping boards, pasta containers, knife block, toaster, kettle, bottle of wine, hand-held vacuum cleaner, microwave oven, placemats, water filter jug, box of chocolates, dog treat containers, phone chargers, paper recycling bag, etc, etc, etc…) and cleaned it all of crumbs and dust. I scrubbed the cooktop clean, wiped the splashback tiles, cleaned the rangehood, and wiped clean all the vertical surfaces – cupboard doors and the oven. And then cleaned the floor.

I’ve been meaning to do this job for too long, and am glad I finally got it done today.

I took Scully for a couple of walks, including one to the mailbox to post a greeting card to someone who bought one on my Etsy shop. And worked on some comics and some secret project.

New content today:

Day 2 of rain bomb n+1

We’ve now had almost 150 mm of rain in the past 40 hours. Most of it was overnight, but it slowly eased off until late afternoon. bY the time I left for my university lecture tonight it had stopped – at least here. There is still heavy rain hitting the northern suburbs of Sydney, but it’s localised to that area. We had some minor flooding in the basement garage, but nothing serious. Around Sydney there was much worse in places, with many roads cut, and evacuation orders issued in a handful of low-lying suburbs near rivers.

Outside Sydney, some rural areas are expecting rivers to rise again and produce flooding even worse than what they experienced a couple of weeks ago. The good news is this current weather system is now weakening, so the heaviest rainfall is probably over.

In interesting statistics, we’ve now had more rain in 2022 than we had in every year from 2008 to 2021. We’re close to passing 2007’s rainfall total too, and if when we get there, then 2022 will be the wettest year since 1998.

New content today:

Day 1 of rain bomb n+1

The rain has hit again. The forecast for today was up to 20 mm. So far we’ve had over 50 mm, and it’s only 9pm. Tomorrow is forecast for 100 mm, and then Friday another 30 mm. And Sydney is getting off lightly compared to some of the places that have been flooding recently – some of those areas are forecast to get over 300 mm.

This morning I had my last face-to-face ethics class at the school for this school term. It’s two weeks holiday over Easter for the kids (and me!), and then we return for term 2. It was raining heavily and the school is having construction work done to build a new hall after the old one burnt down a couple of years ago, so there are makeshift paths and mud and construction workers all over the place.

Tonight I’m baking some sourdough brownies. I thought I’d try to feed the sourdough starter a little more often, which means I’m trying to do things with it in between baking loaves of bread. I wondered if brownies would work, and of course there are dozens of recipes on the net, so we’ll see how it goes.

New content today:

Warm and sunny!

The sun came out today! It was warm! It ain’t going to last though… the forecast for Thursday has been raised to up to 100 mm of rain, with 25 on Wednesday and 30 on Friday. But tomorrow should be hopefully warm and dry.

I worked today on another weekly batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. And… gosh, I’m not sure what else I did. I made some sourdough bread, and made cauliflower rice with fried chilli eggs for dinner.

Sometimes I just don’t know how a whole day flies by so quickly.

Last night I started watching The Exorcist. Despite being a classic, I’ve never seen it before. I’m half way through and might try to finish it tonight. It’s definitely a product of the 1970s, and it’s got a slow burn beginning that takes maybe half an hour just setting up the characters before anything really happens. But it’s getting interesting now and I’m curious to see how it ends.

New content today:

More rain, more teaching

We had another 30 mm of rain overnight, and some heavy showers during today. More expected tomorrow, of course.

This morning was face-to-face ethics teaching at the school. Against about 7 or 8 of the kids in my class were absent. Apparently COVID is raging through schools and infecting kids everywhere. Four of my friends have had it run through their families now, all apparently being brought home from school. We started a new topic today, about challenging authority.

Besides my online classes this evening, I worked mostly on Darths & Droids writing and comics today.

New content today:

Double writing day

It was a very busy day today. I had to write the ethics lesson for this week, on trial by media. Then I had to write a report on the ISO Photography standards meeting I attended back in February, to send to Standards Australia in time for our follow-up national meeting on this Friday. I should have done it a bit earlier, but I’ve been so busy that I put it off to this week. Those two tasks took a good chunk of the day. And then tonight I had three classes to teach, the last ending at 10pm! Thankfully from next week all the classes will be an hour earlier, since we go off daylight saving this weekend. (And I’m leaving the classes unchanged for most of the students who live outside Australia, so they’ll be an hour earlier by my clock.)

I also took Scully out for a drive at lunch time, because it was raining and I didn’t fancy a long walk in the rain. We went to the Italian bakery and I got some treats for me and my wife for dessert tonight, as well as lunch.

We had close to 60 mm of rain overnight, but it eased off during the day, being light for most of the day. Although this evening as I type it’s pouring down again. I added up the rainfall so far since the beginning of the year, and we’re not over the average annual rainfall for Sydney yet, but we’re getting very close.

New content today: