We saw 47 in the carport at Old Reynella, and other people saw 48 in the backyard. Not fun. Seriously thinking of moving to a cooler climate. Too tired to write more today, but ... you get the picture. 😨😫😮😰😵
Tasmania, anyone ...?
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Adelaide: hottest city on Earth. Uh huh.
We saw 47 in the carport at Old Reynella, and other people saw 48 in the backyard. Not fun. Seriously thinking of moving to a cooler climate. Too tired to write more today, but ... you get the picture. 😨😫😮😰😵
Tasmania, anyone ...?
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
A blade of grass can show which way the wind's blowing...
Somewhere in an early episode of Sherlock, John Watson's therapist tells him to blog. Record everything, because looking back over the journal yields a sense of where you were, where you are, and hence, where you might be going. So it's worth noting this:
We've begun to talk about the possibility of one day retiring to a cooler climate. Meaning -- for Aussies -- Tasmania, of course. Now, I've never actually been to Tasmania, so the first thing to do before making any decisions would be to visit the Derwent Valley on holiday, not once but several times. See it in every season, not just in the lovely, "English-like" summers, but also in the wet, cold southern winters. Remember that Hobart rarely if ever gets a flurry of snow except in the mountains, and "cool" is a relative term, particularly in a worlds that's getting so bloody hot, we're having these conversations anyway!
Harping on an increasingly familiar theme, it's just TOO HOT here, already, and the warming trend is only going to go on, with conditions getting worse as years go by. Yesterday, Dave and I were out in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula, looking for a cool spot...
Nope, no joy. Even Inman Valley, which would have been far cooler, was absolutely blistering. Milang was roasting, even down by the lakeshore, where at least a breeze was blowing. '
And that wasn't even the hottest day forecast in the current hot spell:
Tomorrow is going to be such fun. Not. And there really is no answer to this --
Well, there is, but only for people who actually own the house they live in. You can triple-insulate, cover the roof with solar panels, beef up the a/c system, install those special angled, sun-deflecting blinds at the windows. This would create a pocket of cool in which to take refuge for months out of every year.
But landlords generally don't invest this kind of money in rental properties (things might change in future, with the climate going bonkers). We've always rented, and though we've lived in half a dozen houses in the last 20 years, not one of them has been properly insulated, with those blinds. Two of them had a/c that served only one room in the house. Another had only ceiling fans, no a/c at all. One had evaporative a/c, which is inadequate to the job as the temperature soars toward 50 degrees...
All of which makes you wonder how wise it will be, still calling Adelaide home in 2030. Retirement age comes up for me much sooner than that. By 2030, I'll be a septuagenarian! The heat is killing me in 2019, so what'll it be like in another decade, when the climate is that much hotter, and I'm getting ever closer to this life's departure lounge?! It's food for thought, isn't it? Meanwhile...
This, below, is on my mind. No, these are not my shots: I've never been to Tas. But -- compare with the above shots of the poor, roasting Fleurieu yesterday, and think about it...
We've begun to talk about the possibility of one day retiring to a cooler climate. Meaning -- for Aussies -- Tasmania, of course. Now, I've never actually been to Tasmania, so the first thing to do before making any decisions would be to visit the Derwent Valley on holiday, not once but several times. See it in every season, not just in the lovely, "English-like" summers, but also in the wet, cold southern winters. Remember that Hobart rarely if ever gets a flurry of snow except in the mountains, and "cool" is a relative term, particularly in a worlds that's getting so bloody hot, we're having these conversations anyway!
Harping on an increasingly familiar theme, it's just TOO HOT here, already, and the warming trend is only going to go on, with conditions getting worse as years go by. Yesterday, Dave and I were out in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula, looking for a cool spot...
Nope, no joy. Even Inman Valley, which would have been far cooler, was absolutely blistering. Milang was roasting, even down by the lakeshore, where at least a breeze was blowing. '
And that wasn't even the hottest day forecast in the current hot spell:
Tomorrow is going to be such fun. Not. And there really is no answer to this --
Well, there is, but only for people who actually own the house they live in. You can triple-insulate, cover the roof with solar panels, beef up the a/c system, install those special angled, sun-deflecting blinds at the windows. This would create a pocket of cool in which to take refuge for months out of every year.
But landlords generally don't invest this kind of money in rental properties (things might change in future, with the climate going bonkers). We've always rented, and though we've lived in half a dozen houses in the last 20 years, not one of them has been properly insulated, with those blinds. Two of them had a/c that served only one room in the house. Another had only ceiling fans, no a/c at all. One had evaporative a/c, which is inadequate to the job as the temperature soars toward 50 degrees...
All of which makes you wonder how wise it will be, still calling Adelaide home in 2030. Retirement age comes up for me much sooner than that. By 2030, I'll be a septuagenarian! The heat is killing me in 2019, so what'll it be like in another decade, when the climate is that much hotter, and I'm getting ever closer to this life's departure lounge?! It's food for thought, isn't it? Meanwhile...
This, below, is on my mind. No, these are not my shots: I've never been to Tas. But -- compare with the above shots of the poor, roasting Fleurieu yesterday, and think about it...
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Can we say "Climate Change" yet?
Any way you slice it, the place is just ... getting hotter. And dryer. Yesterday, Adelaide was the hottest capital city on the planet Earth, and according to the SMH, the top fifteen hottest sites in the world were all in Australia. There's just no answer to that ...
...this was right outside the back door. It's a struggle to keep the garden alive, but during the past few years there's been a process of elimination, and any plants that can't tolerate pretty extreme temperatures have gradually died off, leaving just the hardy ones. So we do have a garden...
Those were captured just an hour ago -- in the "cool" (hahahaha) of the morning, before the sun burns off the overcast. The sky isn't clear, so we're simmering under clouds that look more or less tropical. A snapshot from the backyard makes it look like it ought to be quite cool (wrong!) or that there's a change in the weather happening (ditto) --
Nope. The truth of what's going on, weather-wise, in this country is actually this:
Uh huh. By 8:30am, you want to be done with whatever you were doing outside, get back in and get the a/c running. Just don't even think about the power bill. Even Zolie was ready to come in by half after eight --
-- which is saying a lot, because this cat seems to be solar powered. She'll usually lie on the pavers, soaking up the sun, in a heavy fur coat, until she's physically lassoed and brought in. Hunh.
Anyway ... we survive. I couldn't help noticing the comments on the SMH site. There must be "professional disinformation spreaders" out there -- probably in the pay of the power companies, or maybe that Clive Palmer idiot, who wants to mine coal and run the coal-burning power stations, which caused the problem in the first place.
If you want a liberal dose of stupid, daft enough to make you glaze right over, try this: "Earth's temperatures are primarily regulated by the amount of sulfur dioxide aerosol emissions in the atmosphere. If a high pressure condition stalls over an area, these emissions quickly settle out of the atmosphere , the air becomes cleaner, and temperatures soar. You Australians have been shutting down your fossil fueled power plants, so you are not replacing the needed cooling SO2 aerosol emissions. A quick fix would be to start up some of your plants, with any SO2 scrubbers turned off. Or pray for a large volcanic eruption to spew some SO2 aerosols into the stratosphere." Uh huh. He actually said that. Some lunatic calling himself Burl Henry, who probably gets paid for chiming in, in the comments on climate feature articles and hosing this idiocy around in the hopes of conning the daft or the unwary. Sigh.
We survive. What can you say? It's too hot to write or even mess about with much art, but my brain keeps ticking over:
There was a young dude from Dee Why,
Whose favorite was spicy-hot Thai.
Some fell off his fork
And before he could squawk
It'd burned a large hole through his thigh.
And
A biologist type from Madrid
Had a blazing affair with a squid.
The result of his sins
Was octuplets, not twins...
-- And a three-year research grant, full government funding --
To find out how he did what he did.
Okay, call it heatstroke. But, you gotta laugh. I'm outta here: cool tea coming up.
...this was right outside the back door. It's a struggle to keep the garden alive, but during the past few years there's been a process of elimination, and any plants that can't tolerate pretty extreme temperatures have gradually died off, leaving just the hardy ones. So we do have a garden...
Those were captured just an hour ago -- in the "cool" (hahahaha) of the morning, before the sun burns off the overcast. The sky isn't clear, so we're simmering under clouds that look more or less tropical. A snapshot from the backyard makes it look like it ought to be quite cool (wrong!) or that there's a change in the weather happening (ditto) --
Nope. The truth of what's going on, weather-wise, in this country is actually this:
Uh huh. By 8:30am, you want to be done with whatever you were doing outside, get back in and get the a/c running. Just don't even think about the power bill. Even Zolie was ready to come in by half after eight --
-- which is saying a lot, because this cat seems to be solar powered. She'll usually lie on the pavers, soaking up the sun, in a heavy fur coat, until she's physically lassoed and brought in. Hunh.
Anyway ... we survive. I couldn't help noticing the comments on the SMH site. There must be "professional disinformation spreaders" out there -- probably in the pay of the power companies, or maybe that Clive Palmer idiot, who wants to mine coal and run the coal-burning power stations, which caused the problem in the first place.
If you want a liberal dose of stupid, daft enough to make you glaze right over, try this: "Earth's temperatures are primarily regulated by the amount of sulfur dioxide aerosol emissions in the atmosphere. If a high pressure condition stalls over an area, these emissions quickly settle out of the atmosphere , the air becomes cleaner, and temperatures soar. You Australians have been shutting down your fossil fueled power plants, so you are not replacing the needed cooling SO2 aerosol emissions. A quick fix would be to start up some of your plants, with any SO2 scrubbers turned off. Or pray for a large volcanic eruption to spew some SO2 aerosols into the stratosphere." Uh huh. He actually said that. Some lunatic calling himself Burl Henry, who probably gets paid for chiming in, in the comments on climate feature articles and hosing this idiocy around in the hopes of conning the daft or the unwary. Sigh.
We survive. What can you say? It's too hot to write or even mess about with much art, but my brain keeps ticking over:
There was a young dude from Dee Why,
Whose favorite was spicy-hot Thai.
Some fell off his fork
And before he could squawk
It'd burned a large hole through his thigh.
And
A biologist type from Madrid
Had a blazing affair with a squid.
The result of his sins
Was octuplets, not twins...
-- And a three-year research grant, full government funding --
To find out how he did what he did.
Okay, call it heatstroke. But, you gotta laugh. I'm outta here: cool tea coming up.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Yes, a telescope!
This was the big item under the tree in 2018...
What can I add to what you see here? The pictures tell all. We ripped the wrapping paper off it almost three weeks ago, and finally got it assembled. We're in the middle of a heatwave, which adds up to vast blue skies, not a cloud in sight, warm nights, so --
Yes, a telescope!
Actually, we've had one before, ten or so years ago. It was stolen, right off the deck outside the house. We used to leave it outside, where it should have been safe enough on a tall upstairs deck, inside big fences, on the inside of a swimming pool like a moat. The steps up to the deck were accessed from practically inside the damn' house. But, nope. One day you wondered where your telescope was: it was conspicuous by its absence.
This will be fun!
What can I add to what you see here? The pictures tell all. We ripped the wrapping paper off it almost three weeks ago, and finally got it assembled. We're in the middle of a heatwave, which adds up to vast blue skies, not a cloud in sight, warm nights, so --
Yes, a telescope!
Actually, we've had one before, ten or so years ago. It was stolen, right off the deck outside the house. We used to leave it outside, where it should have been safe enough on a tall upstairs deck, inside big fences, on the inside of a swimming pool like a moat. The steps up to the deck were accessed from practically inside the damn' house. But, nope. One day you wondered where your telescope was: it was conspicuous by its absence.
This will be fun!
Thursday, January 3, 2019
What an amazing "drop" !!
One of the biggest surprises at Christmas 2018 was this bottle of Bleasdale Bremerview Shiraz, 2009 ... which has been in the house since 2010. I made the decision to open it this Christmas, since we had at least some small reason to celebrate (we're starting to make visible headaway, and given all we've been through, that is nothing to sneeze at).
Now, the wine (bought from the cellar door at Bleasdale) was actually ... a bit acid and rough for my unsophisticated palate in 2010. Then it was stored without much attention (read: none whatsoever) to keeping it at a stable temperature; and eight years later --
Honestly, I didn't have much in the way of hopes for it. To begin with, this one hadn't suited my palate when it was "new," and after being thoroughly abused through eight Aussie summers, I wouldn't have been surprised one iota if it'd turned into paint stripper! Oh, frabjous say ...
Against the odds, it was like drinking dark velvet.
If Frank Langella's Dracula had fancied a glass of wine instead, this would have been his choice:
One word for it: spectacular! I don't imagine you can still buy it anywhere, and I wonder if the other Langhorne Shirazes are as good. The only other such that we've tried (a few years ago, now) was the Rusticana 2013, from Newmans ... we have a bottle of that on store, too. Keep it another year or three; then, when there's cause for celebration...
Christmas was quiet: tree, presents, food...
 |
| The Christmas Eve brunch feast ... see the aforementioned wine at top left. Wow. |
 |
| The Christmas Day brunch feast ... too hot for a sit-down meal. Smoked salmon, turkey, Turkish bread, Swiss cheese, local avocados and cherries... |
 |
| ...and the tree, with its loot intact, before we ripped into it! |
With Twelfth Night looming tomorrow, it's time for The Christmas Tree Down Ditty, and we'll just wade into 2019 and see what can be done this year. Time to pension off this old Christmas tree, for a start: Zolie did quite a number on it, last year and the year before: twelve or thirteen pounds of cat climbing a very light tree? To say it's asymmetrical is an understatement! Time for a new one, in about eleven months' time, I think.
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