weather – Page 20 – dangermouse.net

The calm before the storm

Quite literally. Yesterday, the forecast for Sydney for today and Wednesday was 15 and 30 mm of rain, respectively. When I got up this morning I checked the forecast again and it had been increased to 70 mm for today and 90 mm for tomorrow.

Around midday today they increased tomorrow’s forecast to 200 mm of rain.

This weather system has been causing havoc up the coast, from southern Queensland around the Brisbane area, then moving into northern New South Wales, and tomorrow it’s going to hit Sydney full force. We’ve seen historic record level flooding in several towns, and 8 people are now confirmed dead, with 2 missing, and fears that more bodies will be found once floodwaters recede. In NSW alone, around 40,000 people are now subject to mandatory evacuation orders and another 300,000 are under evacuation warning. Flood warnings have been issued for more towns, including Sydney.

But for now, it’s calm, and not even raining. It was raining very heavily this morning when I took Scully out for her morning toilet. By the time I got back in, I had to change all my clothes because they were wet, despite having a large umbrella. And dry Scully off, despite her wearing a doggy raincoat.

Today I set myself four tasks: Revise the homework for my ethics extension student and send it to him; complete notes for the science student from last night’s class and send those to her; write up rules and design cards for the “Family Argument” board game that I’m working on with my creative design student and send that to him; and write Thursday’s Darths & Droids comic. I managed to get almost all of them done – the first three, and most of a strip written I just need a punchline and that can be done. I guess tomorrow.

New content today:

Rain and floods update

The big news in Australia, which was even ahead of the war in Ukraine on the TV news bulletin tonight, is the absolutely massive amount of rainfall and subsequent flooding currently hitting the eastern coast. Six people are confirmed dead from floodwater incidents, and it’s feared another has died but no body has been found yet. Brisbane’s Wivenhoe Dam is now up to 180.6% capacity – from the 120% that I reported yesterday. They are doing controlled releases of water to avoid dam failure, which means it’s washing downstream towards Brisbane. There’s already flooding of central Brisbane streets from the elevated river level, and flood warnings have been issued fore many suburbs. Current estimates are that around 1500 homes will be flooded in the city tonight and tomorrow.

And that’s just the city. There are smaller towns around the region that are experiencing much worse. Some river levels are up to 22 metres above normal, and thousands of people are being evacuated.

The heavy persistent rain is set to continue for another day or so, and the weather system is moving south, into New South Wales, which is already experiencing flooding in many regions. It’s not anywhere near as bad all the way down here in Sydney, but we’ve received 250 mm of rain in the past four days, and the forecast is for another 150 mm or so in the next few days.

Besides watching the weather reports, I had the 4th class of 6 in my current run of the game design course. Today we worked on combining ideas into a playable set of game rules. The main concept the student came up with for the game is “disagreeing with everyone”. I proposed a few possibilities for how to theme it: (1) a simple party game where you propose business ideas and everyone criticises them, (2) a meeting of philosophers, who naturally can’t agree on anything, or (3) a family gathering, where everyone gets into arguments about various topics. The student chose theme 3 – so we’re now working on a game which is set at a family gathering, and the goal is to argue with all the family members.

I’ll make a first draft of the game rules and equipment—probably just a couple of decks of cards—this week and send it off to the student to playtest before our next lesson next Sunday.

New content today:

Post-super busy week: Saturday

Ah, finally, a day off.

The rain continues. It rained heavily all night, and for much of the day. I managed to get my run in during a period if relatively light rain. And I also went out with my wife and Scully in light drizzle to take some product photos of her new range of hand made bangles to match the doggie bandanas she’s been selling on Etsy. She’s planning to launch the bangles on Tuesday.

The rain is much worse further north. Parts of northern New South Wales are in flood emergencies, and southern Queensland is even worse. Wivenhoe Dam, the main water supply storage for Brisbane, went from 55% capacity to 120% in the past 48 hours. The 100% “capacity” level is defined as a safe storage level, above which Queensland Water must release water downriver. It can actually get up to 225% before the dam overflows – but they won’t let it get that high as that would damage and possibly destroy the dam. Last time this happened, in 2011, the released water flooded the streets of central Brisbane. Oh, I just checked news and a flood warning has been issued an hour ago for parts of Brisbane.

I haven’t kept track, but about half a dozen people have died in floodwater so far. Some towns have been evacuated and are preparing for the worst flooding in recorded history.

For dinner tonight I made pesto using bunya nuts, fresh basil, garlic, olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, salt, and pepper. I served it on penne pasta.

I’ve put most of the bunya nuts into the freezer, because there’s no way we’re going to get through them quickly enough. They’re too rich to eat every day, and I think we have enough for at least a dozen meals, maybe more.

New content today:

Super busy week: Friday

The day kicked off with picking up the groceries from the supermarket. Then I went for my run.

I had a little time before the ISO meeting started at 2pm. But I got a message from the new downstairs neighbour asking if Scully would like to come down and play with their dog Billie, because Billie had been cooped up because of the rain for the past few days and needed some exercise. So I said yes, because Scully also could do with some running around.

The weather, I should mention, has been dreadful the past week or so. We’ve had about 200 mm of rain in the past few days. Parts of Sydney have had more and there have been flash floods in various places. But this is peanuts compared to some places in Queensland, which have had over 300 mm of rain in just 4 hours yesterday. La Niña is walloping the east coast with crazy amounts of rain. And the forecast for Sydney for the next 7 days is heavy rain every day.

Anyway, I waited until there was a break in the rain, and then went down and we let the dogs go berserk in the yard. Which was soaking wet, littered with puddles and mud. After half an hour of playing around, the dogs were filthy. I took Scully back up and immediately gave her a bath. There was no way I could let her stay that dirty.

After bathing Scully it was straight into the ISO meeting. It was the final administrative day, and it led right up to the start of my first ethics lesson.

And after two of those, I went out with my wife and Scully for dinner. We went to the French crêpe place, which is a short drive over a couple of suburbs. The two dinner specials were a beetroot salad galette and a barbecue pulled pork galette, which we ordered. And then for dessert they had a crêpe with chocolate sauce, whipped cream, pretzels, and marshmallows. I had to try that, and it was delicious, with the crunchy pretzels adding a nice texture and hint of salt to the sweetness. A strange combination, but it worked really well.

We walked back to the car, and it was raining. And as we walked it got heavier. And heavier. And heavier. By the time we got back to the car it was pounding down. We got completely soaked climbing into the car and trying to get our umbrellas down. We drove home and had to immediately change clothes and towel off.

Now it’s virtual board games night with my friends. I’m losing as usual…

New content today:

Super busy week: Tuesday

This morning I got up and took Scully out, then had breakfast, and then went for my run. I tried to get it in early before the rain closed in, because the forecast was for a lot of rain today. I managed to get that done. The sky was dark and thundery for several hours before the rain finally arrived around lunch time.

Then the rain pounded down most of the afternoon, very heavy at times with loud rumbles of thunder, interspersed with medium rain. It’s still quite heavy now, late in the evening.

From 2pm I had the ISO Photography standards meeting, held online. One of the first agenda items was to move the first technical session from late today to early Thursday, so we ended up doing only administrative things today.

Before the ISO meeting started, I had to complete work on the new ethics class for this week, since I’ve now moved classed from Thursday evenings to Tuesdays, to give me time to attend the university for the Data Engineering course on Thursdays. But this means I have a day less in between to write up the new topic (I was often doing it on Wednesday mornings). And since the first ethics class was hard up against the end of the ISO meeting, I had to get it completed before 2pm. (Although as it turned out I had a spare hour because of the agenda change, but I didn’t know that in advance.)

For dinner I made pizza, and topped it with pumpkin and some of the bunya nuts that we’re working our way through.

They’re not crunchy like walnuts, which is what I usually use, but added a nice subtle flavour and a different texture.

And finally, in about 10 minutes, I have the second ethics class of the evening. The topic is genetic engineering, which I think will be a good one. The first class went well, and I think the kids enjoyed it a bit more than the patriotism topic.

New content today:

New running bests

On my 2.5k run today I recorded a new best time, 12:01. My current goal is to break 12 minutes, so that’s now tantalisingly close. (My previous best was 12:03.) Strava also informs me that the first mile of the run was my best time for a mile as well, 7:36 (previous best 7:38).

It was another hot day today, after the rainy weather cleared away for yesterday. We got over 30°C both day. But now in the late evening we’re sitting under a big thunderstorm, which is cooling things down again and bringing more rain. And the forecast is for more rain over the next few days. It’s been a very wet summer.

And it was another busy day of ethics classes, with 4 classes on Thursdays. The good thing about Wednesday ands Thursday being so busy is that a full half of the classes I teach are done on just those two days, and the rest of the week is a bit less intense. I had a bunch of administrative things to take care of today, with parents requesting transfers to different timeslots and sending me messages asking questions about things. I was telling my wife all the things I had to do to keep on top of it and she said, “You really have a lot of admin stuff to do with that, don’t you?”

New content today:

Wet, soggy, moist, damp

Today was all about the weather. Since my last blog entry, we’ve had almost 90 mm of rain here in Sydney. It mostly came in two large bursts, about midnight last night, and at lunchtime today. I heard the heavy rain in the night. The midday rain was amazing – it was absolutely torrential for about half an hour, with heavy rumbles of thunder.

I took a photo, but this was after the peak, when the rain had eased off a bit:

By 2pm or so the rain had eased to a sprinkle, but the weather radar implied that we’d be getting more later, so I went out for my run, and just got wet. I didn’t have time to do it in the morning because I had two ethics classes, at 9am and then 11am. And this evening I have two as well, 6pm and 9pm. The 9am class is a new one, that a parent requested because none of the available time slots were suitable. This is the first time I’ve been doing 4 classes in one day, and it’s a bit exhausting, and doesn’t leave time for much else.

In between the morning classes, I took some time to go down to the garage and clean off some of the mould that I’d found growing down there the other day. Disgusting stuff, but alas inevitable in this sort of tropical humidity we’ve been having for over a month now. I installed the damp removers in the garage cupboards – hopefully that will keep things under control from now on.

This evening my wife found a leech in our living room! A leech! That’s how wet it is! I suspect what happened is that during the walk I took Scully on around 5pm, after all of the rain, she picked up the leech while walking through the wet grass. And then once we got inside it dropped off after getting a taste of her anti-parasite treatment. My wife caught the offending annelid in a tissue and we disposed of it before it could attach to a human.

New content today:

Relentless humidity

After I went to bed last night following virtual board games night, a huge storm broke. I was drifting off to sleep when it began: pounding rain, lightning, and thunder. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was a while.

This morning I slept in a little, then got up, had breakfast, and went for my 2.5k run. I really thought I was doing a god time, pushing myself a little, and getting really exhausted by the end of it. But the clock told me it wasn’t that great. It just probably felt more exhausting because it was 24°C and 94% humidity.

The maximum temperature today was just over 30°C, but it was steamy humidity all day. And then there was another storm late this afternoon, although the most intense part swept just north of me and we only saw the edge of it. We go some moderate rain for half an hour or so. And then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again, baking the moisture back out of the ground. It’s 9pm now and it’s over 90% humidity again. And this is the way it’s been pretty much all this week. I really wouldn’t mind if it got hotter, if only the humidity would go down a bit. (Of course, in a summer or two, I’ll be complaining about the 42+°C temperatures and skin-cracking 5% humidities…)

I don’t think I mentioned the other day that when working on that tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting, I actually scribbled out a couple of pages of calculus and was using Matlab to figure out some things. I’m just reminded now because I have the pages sitting next to me here in the desk.

Scully got to go out today with an old friend – Bella the dog who she has stayed with a couple of times when we’ve gone on holidays. Bella belongs to friends of ours, and one of them came over with Bella and one of the kids to visit for a bit.

New content today:

Summer humidity

The weather has been ridiculously humid lately. We’ve been having temperatures around 30°C, and humidities hovering in the 80-100% range. WIth some occasional rain to really drive home the humidity. This is in contrast to the summer of a couple of years ago, when we had much hotter and drier conditions. La Niña is causing this current warm (but not hot) and humid phase. It’s meaning I’m finishing my 2.5k runs every morning completely dripping in sweat.

Today: more ethics teaching, another 3 classes, and more Darths & Droids production.

New content today:

Delivery trek across Sydney

My wife got an order for a dog bandana from her Etsy shop this morning, from a customer who wanted it delivered in time for New Year’s Eve. They live in Sydney, and wanted to know if they could pick it up. But my wife decided we could drive over and deliver it, and take the opportunity for a day out and grabbing some lunch somewhere. I found a good looking pie bakery not far from the delivery address, so we set out.

We made the delivery, and then drove over to the bakery. It began raining heavily while we drove, and when we got there and found a parking place we sat in the car for several minutes to avoid getting soaked. I could see on the radar (on my phone) that it was a passing shower, so we waited it out. Eventually it stopped and we went out to go around the corner to the bakery…

And it was closed! It said online that it’s open 24/7, which is really unusual for any business in Sydney. But I guess that doesn’t include public holidays. (Today is the Boxing Day public holiday, held over from Sunday since both Christmas and Boxing Day occurred on the weekend. Monday was the Christmas public holiday.)

So, anyway, we just headed back home for a late lunch. Through intermittent heavy rain.

Besides an early evening dog walk, and my regular run, I mostly worked on Darths & Droids today. I wanted to complete three new strips, and just finished a few minutes ago… phew.

New content today: