Tag: weather

Second day off, cold and wet

The weather today could not have been more different to yesterday. Yesterday was hot and smoky, but the cold front swept through with thunder and lightning about 10pm, and the temperature dropped dramatically. Today was cool, even slightly chilly, and very rainy.

I didn’t venture out except to take Scully quickly for her toilets. I would have put on a raincoat and gone for a walk at lunch, but I hurt my lower back yesterday and wanted to really rest up today. That seems to have worked, since it’s much better this evening compared to last night.

Not much else to say. I worked on comics, both Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic!

New content today:

First day off, hot and smoky

Today was the first free day of my Christmas break. I took Scully for a long walk early in the morning before it got too hot, because the forecast was 35°C. it didn’t get that high, however, because of a combination of overcast that made the day very steamy, and the distinct smell of bushfire smoke that drifted in late morning. The smoke made the air very hazy (news story here), but it wasn’t local. It had drifted on the wind from a large bushfire near Narrabri, some 500 km north-west (news story here).

But the walk was before the smoke. It was cooler, but still hot and humid enough to mean I was drenched in sweat by the time we got home, at 9 o’clock. Along the way though I was excited to spot a striated heron! These birds are not common in the area. According to my eBird stats, this is only the third time I’ve seen a striated heron around here since late 2020. I tried to get a photo, but I couldn’t get very close and my phone wasn’t up to zooming in that far with decent quality. But still, this is my first photo of a striated heron! It’s the 127th Australian species I’ve photographed.

Striated heron

For lunch I took Scully for a drive instead of a walk. We went to the Allambie Heights pie shop, which I’ve been craving for a few weeks now, but it’s a bit of a drive so not something I can do any old day. And when we got there, they had special Christmas pies!

Christmas pies!

These are more expensive than the usual menu, and contained roast turkey, brie, and cranberry sauce. Of course I had to try one! I also got a Thai chicken curry pie to round out lunch. Both the flavours were excellent – this is a pretty good pie shop.

The temperature continued to climb and reached a maximum about 6pm. It’s cooling down slowly now, but there’s a cold southerly change coming through about 11pm tonight, which should bring thunderstorms and cooler temperatures. The next few days are forecast to be much cooler, thankfully.

New content today:

Another hot day

Sydney hit 40°C again today in some places, and unlike last Saturday it stayed hot well into the evening – it was still 33°C at 8pm. The evening news said this has been the hottest first fortnight of summer ever recorded for Sydney.

So I sat in the house most of the day with the air conditioning on. I had to take Scully out at lunch time, and I also needed to get some lunch since I’d run down lunch supplies before tomorrow’s grocery shopping. Rather than take her for a walk, I drove over to Naremburn and we sat in the shade while I got a sausage roll and a lamington from the bakery.

Today’s also a busy day for my ethics classes, with two before lunch and three in the evening. In the afternoon I worked on assembling more the Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took on Monday. Both my first two classes this evening were plagued by Zoom issues, with some kids disconnecting or lagging or having other glitches that meant i had to repeat questions multiple times, and ask kids to repeat their answers multiple times. This occasionally happens, but it was especially frustrating tonight.

New content today:

Cyclone Jasper

The main news today in Australia is the approach of Tropical Cyclone Jasper to the north Queensland coast. This is a long way from me so there’s no direct concern. But the forecast track looks like making an almost direct hit on the town of Port Douglas tomorrow around lunch time, with the much bigger city of Cairns also within the zone of destructive winds. Hopefully people in the region will be prepared and nobody will be hurt.

Here it was warm again, but felt a bit less humid. I assembled comics in the morning and then took Scully for a drive over to the Italian bakery for lunch. I had a slice of mushroom pizza, and the special pastry today was a panettone snail. It was a scroll of flaky pastry filled with candied fruit and almonds and was delicious. This bakery is always creative and coming up with new things. I just wish they’d do the banoffee croissant again!

This afternoon I wrote my next ethics lesson for this week, on the topic of Restarting Civilisation. We’re going to start by imagining that some disaster such as an asteroid strike kills a few billion people, and then consider what life would be like for the survivors. How would people get food and water? Would they be likely to cooperate for survival, or become hostile? Do survivors have an ethical responsibility to help other survivors, or to maximise their own chances of survival? Once groups of people have stable food supplies, what aspects of modern civilisation should they prioritise in rebuilding first? (laws, education, electricity, transport, etc.?) Should we take some effort (and expense!) now to provide usable information and resources to future survivors in the event of a global disaster?

Tonight for dinner I tried a new thing. I like fennel whenever I go to a restaurant and have a dish that includes it, but I think I’ve only ever tried cooking with it once, doing it as a roast vegetable with other vegetables. On a whim last grocery day I grabbed a fennel bulb, determined to try something else with it. This afternoon I decided to make caramelised fennel and eggplant calzones with a tomato sauce. I caramelised the finely sliced fennel with some balsamic vinegar, then let it cook slowly with diced eggplant. I made pizza dough, and stuffed it with the fennel and eggplant, plus some mozzarella cheese and baked it. And made a separate sauce with onions, garlic, chopped tomatoes, and oregano, to spoon over the top of the baked calzones. It turned out really good!

New content today:

New comic batching

I had a final five classes today on the current ethics topics. But my main achievement was finishing off scripts and then photographing a new large batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I put together the first one for tonight, but I’ll have to start assembling the rest tomorrow.

The weather continues to be warm and humid. We reached 29°C today, and the humidity never dropped below 70%. The next week is looking like being uncomfortably warm, with overnight minimums never dropping below 21°C. In fact we haven’t had any temperature below 20°C since Thursday last week, so it’ll be 10 or 11 days in a row at least. That’s too warm to sleep comfortably, but fortunately we have air conditioning to cool things down a bit further so we can sleep.

I’ve also been organising a Christmas event with my family. My family traditionally does gatherings on Christmas Eve, which is kind of nice because it means everyone can do things with their spousal families on Christmas Day without any clashing. Last year we went to a gathering of extended family, but my mother lives up the coast and doesn’t travel much these days, so she missed out. This year instead my wife and I, and my brother, have made plans to go visit my mother on Christmas Eve. I’ve booked a place where we can go out for a nice lunch, with outdoor seating so we can take Scully as well.

New content today:

Humidity and comic writing

The heading kind of sums up today. It wasn’t nearly as hot as yesterday, only reaching 28°C, but it was very humid, with a cloudy overcast locking in the moisture. I went for a 5k run at 7:30 and it was 20.6°C with 100% humidity. I did manage a faster time than yesterday though, so that was good, but boy was I dripping with sweat by the end of it.

After having a cold shower I spent much of the day writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I’m planning to photograph a big batch tomorrow, just in time for the new week of strips. Hopefully.

Another thing I forgot to mention yesterday: I played another game of Root (the board game) with my wife. We’ve only been playing the cats and the birds factions so far as we’re both still learning the game, but this time I tried the Woodland Alliance for the first time. My wife played cats and absolutely destroyed me. Final score was 31-14. I can see the Alliance strategy will take some time to learn.

New content today:

Board game birthday party and super hot day

Friday was board games night. Normally it would be an online night in the fortnightly rotation, but one of my friends wanted to host it in person as it was his birthday. And he wanted to do some traditional party food like you might get at a child’s birthday party. So he got party pies and spring rolls, and other people brought chips and lollies and stuff. I brought party sausage rolls and my wife decided she had to make chocolate crackles. She got the ingredients and made them the night before. I didn’t tell any of the gaming guys and when I brought out the chocolate crackles everyone thought it was awesome.

When I arrived three of them were just finishing off a game of Jump Drive. Two more arrived soon after me, making it six of us. We had a break to sit out on the balcony in the warmth of the evening and eat, before moving indoors to begin a game of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. I did pretty well, coming second. Then we went on to casual games of No Thanks, followed by Apples to Apples to round out the party evening.

Today was more notable for the weather. It was Sydney’s hottest day since the horrible 2019 Black Summer bushfire season, just before COVID. We reached 40°C in the city and just a fraction shy of 44°C in several suburbs. A cool southerly change is due to come through about 9pm which will hopefully cool it down enough to be tolerable for sleeping. Tomorrow should be cooler, but it’ll build up again to around 40°C by Thursday.

There’s also a dangerous looking tropical cyclone tracking towards the Queensland coast – a long way from me, but it could be serious for the people in northern Queensland. Official warnings haven’t been issued yet as it’s still a few days away, but authorities are starting to say residents should begin preparing.

Despite the heat, I felt I needed to go for a run this morning. I left early, but it was already 25°C at 8:30am, with a “feels like” temperature above 30°C. I took it very easy and managed 5k, in 28:14. Slower than I normally aim for, but fine under the conditions.

For dinner tonight we made a nice hot weather dish: falafel salad with tahini dressing. Lots of chopped salad vegetables – lettuce, cucumber, carrot, tomato – topped with hot falafels, pomegranate arils, and then the dressing, which is tahini, water, lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of salt, cumin, and sumac.

New content today:

Storm fronts and Lego

Late last night, after I’d written my blog post, we had a severe storm hit Sydney. It didn’t last very long, but was incredibly intense, with lots of lightning and loud thunder. My friends and I were tracking the storm radar across the city, and reporting when the rain hit at our various home locations. It hit me about 10pm, and the rain was absolutely torrential, and there was also hail. The hail wasn’t too large, only about pea sized.

And tonight there’s another storm tracking across Sydney as I type this. We just had some heavy rain, but overall it looks less intense than last night.

Today I worked on getting some new Irregular Webcomic! strips written, photographed, and assembled, in time for the coming week. Ideally I’d do a large batch, but I only had time for a week’s worth, which will hopefully give me breathing room to write a full batch for next week. I’m actually planing to wind down production of new comics some time in the not too distant future, as I’m finding it difficult to keep up and it’s providing me with a bit less fun than it used to. But I want to finish off the stories in some sort of way and not leave things hanging. It may take another year or so to do that!

Today there were two nearby Christmas markets on, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. My wife wanted to go check out both of them and do some Christmas gift shopping, so I drove her out to each market, and she walked home with Scully from each of them. She says she’s completed her Christmas shopping now, so that’s good.

And tonight I had three more ethics classes, on the topic of Exercise. Some of the questions I’ve been asking the kids:

  • Can exercise make you feel better mentally as well as physically? How?
  • Do you think people are less fit today than in the past? (given changes in lifestyle from manual labour societies to modern technology)
  • Is it ethical to pressure someone to exercise for their own well-being? If they don’t enjoy it?
  • Is it appropriate for a government to run a campaign to encourage citizens to exercise, as a general benefit to health care?

I’m still a bit exhausted by the end of an evening of teaching, as I still haven’t caught up on my sleep routine after my trip. The past couple of nights I’ve gotten close to sleeping through to a reasonable wake-up time though, so hopefully it won’t take much longer.

New content today:

Stabbed in the back

I got stabbed, or rather jabbed, in the back today. I had an appointment at a nearby hospital to have a cortisone injection in my spine. I’ve been having some issues with partial numbness in my left leg, and did some diagnostic scans a couple of months ago that revealed a pinched nerve in the lower spinal region. My neurologist suggested that an injection in the area would relieve pressure on the nerve, give it more room to conduct properly, and hopefully relieve the numbness symptoms.

So I reported to the hospital for a CT-guided injection. They took me into a CT scanner room and had me lie down on the scanning table face down. I was a bit surprised that they didn’t ask me to take anything off, not even my shoes! They just lifted the shirt off my lower back and did everything like that. I went into the scanner and then the doctor gave me a local anaesthetic and buried a long needle into my back on the left side of the spine. They ran the CT scanner while guiding the needle into the correct position, and then injected the cortisone. It didn’t hurt at all, but I could feel the pressure of the needle and the injection.

Once it was done I could get up straight away and they made me rest for 10 minutes, then I was allowed to go home. There’s no lingering discomfort or pain after the anaesthetic wore off. It feels pretty good. But I think it may take several days to see if there’s any effect on the numbness, because my neurologist booked a follow-up appointment for at least a month after the procedure.

In other news, we had some wild weather today. The forecast was for heavy rainstorms, but the morning and through to mid-afternoon was fine and mostly sunny. Fortunately I was back home from my procedure before the storm clouds rolled in late in the afternoon. We had some spectacular lighting and thunder, and torrential rain, although it didn’t last very long. Multiple lines of storms passed over, with breaks in between. We’ve had 34 mm of rain, in brief bursts over the past 4 hours or so. It should ease off overnight.

New content today:

Still fighting that jet lag

My wife and I are slowly adjusting to our home time zone after our trip. We went to bed at a normal time, but both woke up around 3am. We tried reading to get tired, but that took quite a long time. I think I eventually put the book down around 5am and managed to doze for another couple of hours.

I formatted my travel diary into HTML and stuck it on my website. It’s basically the same as the daily updates I posted here while travelling. I need to add photos, but I haven’t processed or uploaded any of those yet. That takes a lot longer. I still haven’t quite finished doing the photos from my trip to Germany and the Netherlands last year, and I haven’t started doing the photos for Japan in June.

I also dealt with a few other backed-up chores, making appointments, clearing out emails to action, and so on.

The weather here is pretty ordinary at the moment. It’s warm, but wet, and has been since we got home on Monday, with intermittent showers steaming the place up to a very high humidity. Today the showers were heavier. It’s been around 25-26°C during the day, down to a minimum of 19-20°C overnight, which makes for uncomfortably sticky sleeping conditions. There’s no end in sight either, as this pattern is forecast to continue for at least the next week, with some very heavy rainfall to look forward to early next week. One good thing is that my nasal passages are feeling a lot better than in the dry air of Tampere and Rome.

New content today: