weather – Page 13 – dangermouse.net

Things are heating up

It was another hot day today, as we progress towards summer. The channel-billed cuckoos are laying eggs, and there’s a chick in a next outside y kitchen window, screaming raucously for food from its adoptive parents. The Pacific koels are also back from their winter migration, with their loud calls too. And there are starting to be cicadas droning during the day and crickets chirping in the evenings.

We are also, unfortunately, having a noticeable increase in the number of rats around the area. Every night for the past week or two when I take Scully out for a toilet just before bed time, she is growling and barking at rats as they scamper off the footpaths for cover. My wife said she saw a cat the other day catch a rat. When we met Luna’s owners on Saturday, the man said that the rats probably migrated over from the new building site a block away, where a couple of dozen houses were demolished recently to make new apartments. I don’t know, but I guess that it makes sense that old houses might have sheltered rats, and now they’ve had to move somewhere else.

I finished off the Candy topic with my ethics classes today. Next up we’ll be tackling the science fiction idea of shrinking and enlarging people, which I’ll need to write a lesson for tomorrow. This topic will be interrupted my my trip to Europe and resumed when I get back home.

New content today:

Another cold and wet day

This weather is crazy. I went to take Scully for a walk today. I looked at the rain radar and it looked pretty clear for the next hour or so at least. I looked at sunshine outside and grabbed my sun hat and sunglasses. 10 minutes into the walk, it started pouring.

Fortunately I also decided to take an umbrella, even though I thought for sure I wouldn’t need it, just because I thought the weather might change ridiculously and I didn’t want to be caught 20 minutes from home in rain without one. So that was okay. But then by the time we got home the rain had stopped and the sun had come out again!

Tonight is inline board games night with my friends. We’ve been playing a new word game that one of them invented and implemented on his Discord bot. It’s pretty fun! And right now we’re enjoying another game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal.

New content today:

A very cold October day

I saw a story a week or two ago about why Sydney experiences such changeable weather in spring. I mentioned this here as well at the beginning of October – how we seem to have hot days and cold days interleaved, and a mild or pleasantly warm day is a rare thing. The article explained it in terms of the prevailing weather systems at this time of year, how hot air masses from the tropical north compete by pushing south against cold Antarctic air masses from the south, and they see-saw back and forth, giving us alternating periods of hot and cold weather. It’s different in autumn, when we generally have a pleasant gradation of days from the heat of summer into the cool of winter.

Anyway, yeah. Just two days ago we had the hot, with temperatures over 36°C in parts of Sydney. Whereas today the maximum was just 16.1°C, and with strong winds that pushed the wind chill temperature as low as 7°C as I looked at when I took Scully out for her lunch time walk today. We’re going to have this cold again tomorrow, but the forecast is warming over the weekend and up to 32°C on the coast and 36°C in inland suburbs again by Monday.

I had 5 ethics classes today. And took Scully for a drive at lunch, to drop off some extra cold weather clothing for my wife at her office after she messaged me in the middle of the day to say she needed it. After dropping that off, I took Scully to the Italian bakery at Cammeray for lunch. Normally I sit on a bench nearby to eat, but it was so cold and windy that I retreated with Scully and broke one of my strongest taboos: I sat and ate in the car. I never do this. I think I’ve eaten food in my car maybe twice in my life – I vaguely recall doing it once about 20 years ago.

I actually feel ashamed now.

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Weird weather

Just three days ago we were sweltering in 35°C. Today was so cold that I had to pull out my woollen jumper again (“sweater” for US folks). It was very windy, which made the already cool temperature feel pretty cold.

A friend of mine has said on a few occasions that Sydney doesn’t have nice weather for spring. We have hot and cold days dithered together, early spring having more cold days and late spring having more hot days.

In between ethics classes I took Scully to the brand new park again. It’s a very nice place to sit and eat lunch. And there today I witnessed a Buridan’s Ass moment. A woman came into the park and was looking for a place to sit. She reached a point where there were two empty benches facing each other about 10 metres apart, and she was standing in the middle looking at first one, then the other, then back to the other one… She looked back and forth for maybe 30-40 seconds, before finally continuing to walk, and she eventually found another bench somewhere else.

This evening I had a nice Turkish dinner out with my wife. Hummus and flatbread, grilled haloumi, dolmades, and falafels.

And tonight we were supposed to have in-person board games night, but a few people are away travelling and we would have had three people at most, so we converted to online games and the travellers are joining in.

New content today:

A taste of summer

It was hot today, like a midsummer day. We reached 35.6°C in the city, and over 37°C in some suburbs. Tuesday is expected to be more of the same, although oddly tomorrow is forecast to be only 24°C. We have a cold southerly change coming through late this evening, but it won’t last very long before the heat builds up again. And this with still 2 months to go before summer starts.

I did manage another 5k run early this morning, before it got too hot, but it was 24°C even at 8am, so it wasn’t particularly comfortable running weather.

My wife and I played another game of Root again, this time swapping roles again so I played the cats and she the birds. It’s a game that requires several plays to understand the strategies, so we’re trying to play it frequently and reinforce our knowledge, not letting it fade from our brains.

Oh, and daylight saving started today here, so I’ve moved all my online classes an hour later, to keep them at the same time for all the students who don’t live in southern Australia – which is basically all of them at the moment except one.

New content today:

Getting a new chilli plant

Today was forecast to be hotter than yesterday, but it didn’t quite make it there. The other big change from the past three years is how noticeably dry it’s been lately. Almost no rain in the past month or so, and the humidity has been low. Grass in the park across the street was lush and green a week or two ago, but is now already showing signs of dying off and turning brown.

On the other hand, spring flowers are out in full force. Cherry blossoms are dropping and the trees turning to foliage. There are tons of clivias blooming bright orange all over the neighbourhood. And huge bushy displays of azaleas in pink, white, and red.

Speaking of plants, I went to the hardware store today to pick up a new chilli plant. I’d bought one a few years ago and it produced an abundance of chillis, but it died at the beginning of winter. With spring blooming now, I thought it was a good time to get a new plant. Only $4, and it should produce a lot more value than that in fresh chillis for our meals.

Tonight I started the new ethics topic: Energy. I wrote the lesson plan during part of the image processing lecture last night (while the lecturer was speaking and I was sitting waiting for interactive time with the students), and I think I rushed it a bit. A lot of the questions are a bit too prescriptive and not the open-ended ethical dilemmas that lead to interesting discussion. So I had to improvise a bit to keep things interesting. I’ll try to revamp the outline a bit tomorrow.

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New Mexican food

Today was the hottest September day on record in Sydney, 34.6°C. Tomorrow is forecast to be even hotter. That’s not really a terrible temperature for the middle of summer, but in September it’s obviously weird. We also had a total fire ban today, the first one declared in three years, and no doubt the first of many for this coming summer.

The Bureau of Meteorology also officially declared an El Niño today. The Australian Bureau was the last major meteorological department in the world to declare that this El Niño had begun. Most others declared it several weeks ago, but the Aus Bureau has stricter criteria and were holding off until the surface trade winds showed consistent reversal lasting at least 7 days, which finally happened today.

Rather than walk Scully to my wife’s work before hopping on the train to the university for tonight’s image processing lecture, my wife left a bit early and I picked her up in the car and brought her home, before I walked the much shorter distance to the nearest station. I would have been very hot and sweaty if I’d walked all the way like usual.

Continuing my mission to try a new place for dinner every week this semester, I found a Latin American place. I tried the jalapeño peppers stuffed with goat cheese, and a couple of tacos, one with shredded chicken and one with pulled pork.

They were pretty good, but this was a bit more expensive a place than the numerous Asian eateries around this area of town.

The lecture tonight was the last of the actual lectures, on deep learning. Next week is the introduction to the student project. Many of the students have already been talking with me about their plans for project topics, which is good!

New content today:

A warning blast of summer

The talking point today was all about the weather. We reached 32.8°C in the city, and a degree or two higher in the suburbs. This heat will continue to intensify for the next three days, with a forecast of 34°C on Wednesday, before dropping back to 18°C (a much more normal temperature of this time of year) on Friday.

Despite the morning heat I went for a run, though decided to do just 2.5k today. Then I spent some time writing and producing Darths & Droids comics. I took Scully for a walk after lunch. It really felt like summer out there.

Not much else to report today. I was a bit tired due to getting home late from last night’s D&D game, and then tossing a bit during the night. I had a weird dream: Sigourney Weaver came over for dinner. During dinner she revealed that some years ago she’d secretly impregnated us with Aliens and then removed them just before they chestbursted. I don’t know what she was trying to achieve by telling us this now.

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Smoke before the fire

There was more smoke blanketing the city this morning, produced by controlled burning of bushland around the outskirts. I saw an article on a news site yesterday explaining why the best days for controlled burns are also more likely to result in the smoke being trapped under an inversion layer over the city, rather than being blown away.

I took this photo while taking Scully for a walk at lunch time. By this time the smoke had actually cleared a bit – it was worse earlier in the day.

The forecast continues to stretch the period of hot days. We’re now expecting 6 days in a row of temperatures over 30°C in much of the city, getting up to 35°C in places, beginning tomorrow. Today was warm, but not hot, only reaching the mid 20s. It would have been very pleasant except for the smoke.

On the way back home with Scully, we ran across an eastern water dragon:

These guys are usually inconspicuous in the winter and only visible in the summery months. So another indicator that the weather is unusually warm for this time of year.

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An ominous early spring

It’s officially spring here, and though we’re less than two weeks out of winter it’s already feeling like late spring. Smoke has been hanging in the air over the city for the past few days, the result of controlled burning operations to reduce fuel load in the bush areas on the fringes of the city. Gentle winds have been blowing it across the city and most suburbs have been feeling the effects.

I went into the city a bit early today to pick up a copy of Cyberpunk Red that I’d ordered from the game store. While there I also grabbed copies of Scum & Villainy, and Root: The Roleplaying Game. Then I walked over to the university for this evening’s image processing lecture. I went via Darling Harbour, and caught this photo of the sun in the afternoon sky:

I’d seen earlier in a Sydney forum online someone saying they’d moved here since 2019 and the current smoke was awful, and they were asking if it was anything like the smoke we had during the bushfires in 2019. And everyone was saying this is nothing compared to what it was like in 2019, when we pretty much couldn’t see the sun for days on end and ash was falling from the sky. It was a horrendous, apocalyptic time. What we have now really is nothing compared to that. (My posts from 19 December 2019, 21 Dec, 31 Dec, 12 Jan 2020)

Looking back at the city from the other side of Darling Harbour:

I found another new place for dinner before the lecture. A Thai place, where I had pad Thai with soft-shelled crab:

In other weather news, the ginkgo trees here are starting to show new leaves, later than most of the other trees which are developing new foliage. Lots of flowers are out. And the forecast for the next week is looking ominous. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday are all forecast to have temperatures around 34-35°C in parts of Sydney, though the coast will be a few degrees cooler. This is serious summer weather, before the spring equinox. You can feel everyone here holding their breaths for this impending El Niño summer.

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