weather – Page 25 – dangermouse.net

Chilly Saturday

Last winter here in Sydney was notably mild. This time as we head towards the end of autumn, it’s already noticeably colder than last year. We just had the coldest week of overnight minimum temperatures for the month of May, in the last 54 years. We had six nights in a row with the temperature dropping below 9°C.

Okay, I know that’s peanuts compared to places that get freezing temperatures and snow and stuff, but it’s pretty darn cold for Sydney. Taking Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet around 10pm every night I’ve really been feeling the cold. Daytime temps have not been too bad though, with maximums around 20°C, which honestly is fine, especially if you’re out standing or walking in the sunshine. I’m not looking forward to the winter though.

Mostly today I worked on Irregular Webcomic! strips form the recent batch I photographed. Normally I make all the strips in one big effort and write the annotations and upload the files in one go. But I needed to get some uploaded for last week in a hurry, so I only did a few of them. Which means I had to do more today for the coming week.

I also had some cleaning up to do after last night’s games night. And this evening my wife and I went out for a nice dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. It’s the place where we had dinner on the night before our wedding, yay many years ago, so it always feels kind of special going back there for dinner. I had a lovely Goan fish curry. Mmm…

New content today:

A day of prep work

Today I spent doing a lot of preparation, for two different things.

Tomorrow is market day, and I had a few things to do to get ready for travelling over there and setting up my stall. My wife and I will be trying to sell my photography and her doggie bandanas again. We have a new display rack for the bandanas, to get them up closer to people’s eye-lines, rather than just lying flat on the table. So hopefully we’ll sell more of those.

Mostly I worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips though. The current buffer will run out this week, so I need to get a batch photographed and assembled in the first few days after Sunday. It’s actually going to be tricky squeezing it in, as I have other things to do this week too.

This afternoon we took a break (me from writing comics, my wife from sewing bandanas) to take Scully for a long walk. We went past the bakery a suburb over and down past the water – our usual long route. Although the weather was clear, it was very cold and windy. The first tendrils of winter have really hit in the past couple of days. Today’s maximum was only 16.9°C, which is pretty much a chilly winter day. I rugged up with a jumper (a sweater in US English) and a jacket, and still felt cold.

I know this is almost laughable for those of you who live in colder climates, but this is pretty much midwinter temperatures here, and I’m not used to it. It already feels like this is going to be a colder and longer winter than last year’s remarkably mild one.

New content today:

Unethical Wednesday

I don’t know what’s going on with this weather. The Bureau told us it would rain today, but there wasn’t a drop, and it was another fine day, although a bit chilly rather than warm. This seems to be a long term trend with weather forecasts here. Often they forecast rain, and it just never eventuates.

Normally I’d have my face-to-face Ethics class at the school today, but the kids are doing their NAPLAN tests this week, so my class was cancelled. I ended up driving over to the same car park by the school anyway, because my wife wanted one of the Aldi supermarket specials that was released today. They had super cheap dog beds a while back and she bought one, and of course it turned out that Scully loves the cheap Aldi dog bed and ignores the expensive dog bed from the pet store. So she’s been looking out for the specials ever since, and finally it reappeared, so she despatched me to get another one for her office.

Back home it was a comics writing day, interrupted by some more prep work for the ISO Photography meeting next month. Unfortunately for me, this time the meeting is being held in a time zone that works for the USA and Europe… which means it’s going to be the middle of the night for me. The sessions run from 23:00 to 02:30 here in Sydney, Monday to Friday. So it’ll be a week of very late nights.

In COVID related news, the Australian Government released their annual Budget last night. Notably, there was a strong underlying assumption that Australia’s borders will remain closed until at least mid-2022. That means no tourists visiting, and no residents in Australia allowed to leave the country. I’d been imagining we could start travelling again by the end of 2021, but now we’re looking at still more than a year until that’s possible. We’ll probably have to have a COVID vaccination shot, and then the next annual shot after that before we can travel… (I’m assuming this is going to end up as an annual thing like flu shots.)

New content today:

And a perfect half day…

After yesterday’s perfect autumn day, the forecast today predicted rain, although not until the afternoon. So I decided to take advantage of what may be the last fine morning of the week to go and play some golf. And I decided to take advantage of the New South Wales Government’s COVID stimulus voucher program by getting them to pay for my round, so it was a free day out.

It really was a nice morning, although cooler and cloudier than yesterday.

This is the “pitch and putt” course where every hole is a par 3. My local full-sized course doesn’t (AFAIK) accept the COVID vouchers, so I travelled out here to use one. The course was fairly empty today, and playing by myself I used two balls in parallel, playing each hole twice as I went around the course once. I kept score separately and managed my best ever total for one of the balls, so that was good.

On this hole, 13, I managed to hit both balls from the tee onto the green! I was playing one pink ball and one yellow ball. The pink one should be easy to see – the yellow one is way at the back of the large double green (left of the big light pole on the right)… but that still counts!

After golf, I drove over to my favourite pie shop for lunch, and ate pies by the beach. There were pelicans hanging out there.

This afternoon I spent time working on some ISO Photography standards stuff, in preparation for the next meeting we’re having, which is coming up in June. I had to write up some comments on a draft document and submit them, and do some admin stuff with the meeting agenda and so on. Nothing particularly exciting, but it consumed much of the afternoon.

New content today:

The last perfect autumn day?

Carl Sagan said in the TV series (and book) Cosmos:

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth… then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

Today felt like that last perfect day. It’s late autumn and we’ve already had a couple of cold weeks as we descend into the chilly depths of winter. But the past few days have been nice, and today was the culmination of a short warming trend. It reached 25°C here in Sydney, and the sky was a brilliant shining blue, with a gentle breeze just to keep the air moving so you didn’t feel hot in the sun.

I had occasion to be out and about. After my Monday morning online ethics class (teaching two 10-year-old boys today, same topic as last Friday’s class), I had an appointment in North Sydney for an ultrasound examination, which my doctor had ordered to check out a niggling persistent pain in my abdomen. It’s about half an hour’s walk, and I decided to make the most of the day by walking, rather than catching the train.

And it was gorgeous being outdoors in the late autumn sunshine. My route took me past St Leonards Park and to the Ridge Street Lookout, from where I captured this view looking south towards the city centre:

The city centre is on the right, and the harbour stretches east (left) towards the ocean. You can see the Harbour Bridge (giant steel arch on the right) and the Opera House (left of the big white “Bayer” building near the Bridge).

For my ultrasound, I had to fast all morning – no food or drink since last night. So by the time it was done at 11:30 I was really hungry. I walked back north to Crows Nest and a local pub where I like their chicken schnitzel lunch special. It’s a bit decadent, so I don’t get it very often, but it’s the best chicken schnitzel I’ve had anywhere.

From there I went straight to pick up Scully from my wife’s office, so I could look after her during the afternoon. Late afternoon I took Scully to the dog park down at Waverton. And from here I got another amazing view of the city, in the late afternoon light just as it was transitioning from the harsh midday sun to a beautiful warmer glow.

Again you can see the Bridge. And yes, you can see the Opera House in this photo – but you need to either know where it is or be really good at spotting it. You can also see a few clouds just starting to creep in. The forecast for tomorrow is a cooler 21°C and afternoon rain, possibly including a storm. And with the rain and cooler weather set to last for several days, I think it’s highly possible that today was indeed the last perfect autumn day for the year.

New content today:

Change of season

We’ve been experiencing a rather cool autumn. After last year when we had an extremely mild winter, it feels unusually chilly for this time of year. I’ve taken to wearing a jacket when going outside about a month earlier than last year.

The leaves on the deciduous trees are changing. Mostly in Sydney that means plane trees turning a dull shade of light brown. There are a few liquidambars scattered around that go a lovely deep red, but they’re not that common, and for the most part of course all the other trees are evergreen. So it’s not spectacular, but it is noticeable.

I took this photo of a path I walk down while collecting Scully from my wife’s office. The plane trees a mix of green and brown. This is basically what autumn looks like in Sydney.

The coolish weather makes it lovely to be outside. And after last month’s ridiculous amounts of rain, April has been extremely dry so far. We haven’t had any rain since the 8th, three weeks ago. And what we had in that first eight days was only about 10% of the April average rainfall. What we have had the past week or so is smoke – the bushfire control authorities are taking this cool weather as a chance to burn a lot of the undergrowth in forests around the edge of the city, and the prevailing wind conditions are wafting it across the city.

I took this photo at the dog park this afternoon while walking Scully. It’s normally a lovely view, but you can see the brown smoke across the lower level of the sky.

Tonight for dinner I tried a variant of one of my regular dishes. Pasta with butternut pumpkin, nuts, chilli, and feta. I normally use walnuts, but tonight I tried pistachios, which worked really well. And made it pretty colourful.

Oh, and in good news I have two students signed up for my first online Critical and Ethical Thinking class, tomorrow. Tomorrow’s class is in a time zone suitable for Australia/Asia, but I also have another parallel class on the same topic in a time zone better suited for the Americas (Sunday afternoons in US time zones).

New content today:

Secret busy-ness

I worked on a secret project today, so I don’t have much that I can report here.

The weather was nice. A sunny autumn day, not too hot, not too cold. More please!

New content today:

The feel of autumn

I really noticed today that autumn is in the air. The weather has turned crisp and cool – the maximum temperature today was only 24.6°C, although it was cooler this morning when I was out and about. After my Ethics class I drove out to the Pitch-and-Putt golf course where I met a friend and we played 18 holes. The trees around the city are looking autumny – at least the ones that actually change colour. Liquidambars are going red, and the plane trees are going that dull brown colour and starting to drop their leaves.

It was the last Ethics class of the school term, with the students getting two weeks of holidays for the Easter break, so I have two weeks off now before the second term begins in mid-April. Today we talked about what constitutes punishment: is it punishment if it’s accidental, or unintended, or if the recipient enjoys it, or if it’s imposed by someone with no authority. (The last one was illustrated with the example of a boy who teases his younger sister, and she gets back at him by hiding his cricket bat. Is losing his cricket bat punishment, or is it only punishment if one of his parents takes it away?)

We had a good discussion. At the end of the class, one of the boys said he would be moving to a new school, so he wouldn’t be in the class next term. This reduces my class size down to 12 students. Which is much more manageable than the 21 I had last year.

At golf, I did poorly for the first 9 holes, but got my eye in and scored really well on the last 9.

Back home this afternoon I worked on photos and writing up my trip from a couple of weeks ago as a full travel diary – expanding the entries I posted here to add more details and photos.

Oh, I should mention that Comments on a Postcard is running low on submissions. This is the easiest webcomic in the world to submit material for! If you’re reading this, you probably have what it takes to submit some stuff – so please take a look.

New content today:

Non-market rainy Sunday

The weather today wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, given yesterday’s dire forecasts. It was quite rainy, but there were a few dry spells, and the rain didn’t get really heavy until this evening. Monday and Tuesday are forecast to have heavier rain again though.

There is major flooding along much of the coast from Sydney north to Port Macquarie (where we were staying the last week). Some regions have been hit with what the emergency services are calling a “once in 100 years” flood. As of now, 137 schools will be closed on Monday due to flooding. Parts of western Sydney around the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers are expected to get floods roughly at the levels of a flood which occurred in 1961. Water levels there are expected to peak late Monday or on Tuesday. A “major flood” of the Hawkesbury River is defined as a water level of 12.2 metres above normal, and the predicted peak at the moment is 15.6 metres.

Oh, I just checked the latest news, and the Nepean River has now exceeded the flood level of 1961. This is crazy stuff.

I’m fine – we’re not in a flood-prone area. I spent most of today working on new Darths & Droids comics, catching up for the week spent away on holiday. And a bit of time building a new Lego set that I spoilt myself with recently. I also went out in a relatively light drizzle to take Scully for a walk, and get a few groceries for dinner and breakfast. I’m planning to do a big grocery shop tomorrow morning, when most people are back at work. Sunday shopping is always really busy, so it’s better to avoid it.

Oh, yesterday I also worked on some more photos from the trip. I have some birds to show off:

This (above) is a bar-tailed godwit. These birds migrate to southern Australia from northern Siberia. This species in particular has the longest non-stop migration flight of any known bird. This guy will be heading back to Siberia some time in the next month or two.

A sooty oystercatcher.

Two pied oystercatchers.

A little wattlebird.

A willie wagtail.

A superb fairywren.

Not a bird… I think this is a diamond python. It was very close to where we were walking I could probably have reached out and touched it.

New content today:

Extreme rainfall

It continues to be about the rain here in Sydney. We’ve had 150 mm of rain in the last 24 hours, and advice from the Bureau of Meteorology is that the rainfall will get heavier in the next 12 hours. They also say it won’t stop raining until at least Thursday. Also, when I woke up this morning, we had no power. It was out for over two hours.

Many towns up the coast north of Sydney are experiencing flooding and have evacuations ongoing to get people away from rising floodwater. Warragamba Dam, Sydney’s main water reservoir, is at 100% capacity and spilling over. The river downstream has a wide flood plain, covering dozens of Sydney suburbs, which are now anxiously watching and waiting for evacuation orders. The highway north is cut off at Taree, which we drove through yesterday. If we’d left Port Macquarie a day later, we may not have made it home at all.

Here’s what it looked like outside this morning:

The rain has been heavy to extremely heavy almost all day, with just a few brief periods of light or no rain. The garage downstairs in our apartment block got flooded:

Fortunately my car space is up the slope, and stayed dry, but some people’s spaces were ankle deep in water. The water was deepest near the garage entrance door – about calf-deep:

There’s a lift here, and it was sandbagged to try to keep water out of the lift shaft:

It couldn’t hold all day though, and water eventually got in and flooded the lift shaft. In a separate incident, some people got stuck in another one of the lifts, even though the shaft wasn’t flooded. It was a family with a baby. The lift guy arrived after about 45 minutes and I happened to be outside when he got here, and since I had keys I ended up helping him get to the floor above the lift so he could climb onto the roof of the lift car and release the doors to get the people out:

Beyond staying indoors and avoiding the rain, I mostly spent the day working on photos from my trip. I have some to show off, but maybe tomorrow. It’s been a curiously exhausting day, following the news for weather alerts and flood warnings.

New content today: