Tag: weather

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.

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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:

Are we in for more rain? Yes, we are

Yesterday was not only Scully’s birthday, but my sister-in-law’s, so today we went out for a Sunday brunch with my wife’s family to celebrate.

We had a bit of trepidation, because it was at a cafe by the beach, and looking at Google Streetview it looked like the outdoor tables were protected only by flimsy sun umbrellas, whereas the weather forecast was for storms. We assumed we must have had the outdoor area booked, because we’d be bringing Scully. Checking the weather radar before leaving, it looked like we might be lucky, with a storm line moving through but clear air behind it. Indeed, it poured on us while we drove over there, but stopped by the time we got there. But we needn’t have worried, because they gave us a table well under cover – they allowed dogs into a large area under the cover of a patio awning.

Looking at the menu, I decided on eggs benedict (my usual go-to when eating out for breakfast). But then I saw a woman at an adjacent table being served a delicious looking plate of something, with a visible poached egg and a pile of chopped tomato. I checked the menu and concluded it must be the “halloumi bruschetta”, so I ordered that instead. And then when my dish arrived it was nothing like what that woman had received! I’d obviously made a mistake in assuming what it was, and so I ended up with neither my first choice meal nor the dish that looked amazingly good. Fortunately what I had was also perfectly fine, so no real complaints, just an amusing story.

After the brunch the rain held off, so I went for a walk with my wife and Scully along the beach to the centre of the suburb. There was a Sunday market on to look at, and I tried some gelato from a new place that looks like a high class Italian gelateria. They had some very interesting flavours to choose from. I tried the Black Forest (I can never go past Black Forest), and the pavlova with berries. After carefully shaping each scoop into the paper cup, another staff member wiped the freezer display case clean of any stray drips or blobs of gelato, to keep the entire thing looking immaculate and pristine. I’ve never seen that at a gelateria before! It was very good. I’ll have to go back again and try more of the flavours.

Back home, I managed to get my run in before the rain settled in for the remainder of the afternoon and evening. We’re supposed to get another 100 mm or more of rain over the next week. And it’s worse news for the flood-hit regions further north, which are expected to get much more rain than that. The TV news tonight said the worst-hit regions were now expecting another 80–160 mm in the next 6 hours, to be followed by more in the next days. The Bureau of Meteorology says that another east coast low pressure system seems to be developing – the same type of system that caused the ridiculous amounts of rainfall and flooding a few weeks ago. And this is with the land already now saturated. I guess we’ll see how it develops.

New content today:

Rain and the city

Yep, the rain is back. We had a few moderate showers throughout the day, but nothing really heavy. Tomorrow is supposed to be heavier, and then more heavy rain on Sunday.

The city looks nicer in the rain though, with the lights streaking across the wet roads and footpaths. I went in to the university a little later today as I had to look after Scully all day and then drop her at my wife’s work late, before heading in on the train. Rather than have a nice dinner somewhere near the university I grabbed some Vietnamese rice paper rolls from a take-away near the station.

The lecture tonight was the class I put together for data presentation, so mostly my material and exercises. I think it went pretty well! It was raining lightly on the way home, but I got a train quickly, so that wasn’t too bad.

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We survived the night

The rain stopped in the early hours of the morning, and we only had a light sprinkle today. And the sun came out in the afternoon.

It actually felt really weird, seeing sunlight.

I had my third face-to-face ethics class of the year this morning. There were more kids there, but still about 6 away sick. Slowly adding more kids to the class is helping with my memorisation of their names – I actually managed to run the class today without needing to give them name tags, and I had them all sorted out. And this class is very well behaved compared to some of the classes I’ve had in recent years, so we had a really good discussion on the topic of Fairness in Society, with plenty of good contributions from the kids.

Back at home I worked on some project examples for the data engineering course, and I’m getting very close to finishing the slides for Week 5 (in two weeks).

New content today:

Flooding has hit Sydney

The only thing to talk about in Sydney today was the weather. Specifically the rain, the enormous amounts of rain. Today was the 15th day in a row of rain here, and the heaviest. The Bureau of Meteorology forecast 150 mm of rain, and it looks like we may even exceed that. Added on to the previous two weeks of rain, with saturated soils and dams already full to overflowing, and it was a recipe for disaster.

First off, I’m fine, and my home is fine. I don’t live in a low-lying area, and I didn’t venture out onto the roads today.

But many people across Sydney are not so lucky. All of Sydney’s rivers, the Nepean, Hawkesbury, Parramatta, Georges, and Cooks Rivers are all flooded and spilling out into surrounding low-lying areas. Evacuation orders have been issued for dozens of suburbs, with the warning that people may be stranded in regions without power or water and it may be too dangerous to rescue them. On top of this there is widespread flash flooding all over the city, with roads being inundated and water flowing into properties. Hundreds of people have been stranded in waterlogged cars, and unfortunately two people have been recovered after losing their lives in floodwater. This is on top of the 20 people killed so far in the ongoing flooding across the rest of New South Wales and Queensland. There have also been a few landslides in places in and around Sydney.

The rain is expected to ease tomorrow, and we might even get some sunshine on Thursday, before more rain comes in after that. But tonight we have a gale warning current, for winds up to 110 km/h. Given all the trees across the city completely saturated with water, that’s going to cause a lot of them to blow over. Hopefully I’ll be here tomorrow…

New content today:

Making more bad graphs

It rained heavily again overnight, and more during the day. The weather seems to be the only thing everyone is talking about around here – the rain has just been so relentless. And more to come, we have another 80 mm forecast for Tuesday, and the Bureau of Meteorology says don’t expect the rainy weather to end any time soon.

Besides my daily run, and teaching ethics classes, I worked today some more on the lecture for the data presentation part of the data engineering course. I followed up my bad graph of a couple of days ago with some more today, and interactive material which will be run during the lecture to quiz students on aspects of visual presentation. I’m nearly done with this task now – maybe another coupe of slides tomorrow and I can move on to other jobs.

New content today:

Engineering data 2

It seems this intense rain weather system is very unpredictable. We were bracing for very heavy rain today, potentially the worst so far, but it turned out nowhere near as bad as yesterday.

Still, what rain there was, and flash flooding, interrupted train services. I had to travel into the university this evening for lecture 2 of the Data Engineering course. I could leave a bit earlier since there wasn’t the ISO meeting this week, and I did so, planning a leisurely dinner at a nice Asian place in the “Spice Alley” food laneway near the uni. But I ended up waiting 40 minutes at the station for a train – about 6 or 7 trains in a row were cancelled. And of course by the time a train finally showed up, it was full of people – meaning I had to cram on in what seemed like a ridiculously dangerous proximity given COVID.

I got to the university too late for a sit down meal, and wasted time tried to find a sushi place where I could just grab a take-away bento box, but in vain. In the end I ended up in the university food court, where half the places were closed for the evening already, and I chowed down a chicken schnitzel on a tortilla quickly before heading to the lecture room.

The lecture went well, and I had to wander around the room during the tutorial exercises and answer questions form students. It was pretty easy today but will get more complex as the course progresses.

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