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Weekend
The boys had their boosters today so we are a fully triple vaxed family now. :)
COVID-19 is now a major thing around here. Over 1000 cases the past two days and I assume it’s going to move to a much higher number soon. I feel like I am going to get it every time I go out now. I’d like to limit shopping but it’s hard to do that when so much is still missing. There have been some alternate shops that have supplies but now everybody realised it and now there are bigger crowds there and longer lines. And lower supplies.
Today we got a mesh system for our wi-fi. We’ve had some problem spots in the house from way back and this is a means to support our internet use, I guess. Several of my devices have gotten much faster now. The main problem is my laptop, which sometimes is fine and other times is not. It’s not so different than it was before the mesh.
News of current events is hard to watch right now. Tonight the Scientist and I started to watch the “series” Get Back about the Beatles making the Let it Be album and it was fascinating to watch. Each episode runs well over two hours and we saw about half an hour so. I look forward to seeing more.
Here in Australia autumn begins on the first day of March. Our temperatures are staying reasonably hot until Monday. From Tuesday they will be dropping considerably, as though that’s the end of the hot weather. Of course, I know there’s more heat to come but it’s kind of funny the way the forecast is set out.
I had a couple of bunches of bananas that were getting really ripe and finally made a banana bread tonight. It came out rather nice except that it didn’t rise. Or I should say it rose and then fell once it was out of the oven. I’m doing the recipe from memory so maybe I need to adjust the baking powder or soda amount…I’m making another one tomorrow but a request has come to add chocolate chips and we don’t have any. I hope to find some to add and I might make them muffins instead.
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New Year
It’s a new year or at least it is in this blog. I’ve been too silent lately but I’m hoping to change that. I still have a post to write about going to Brisbane in November so that might be one of the next posts I write.
We’re just about at the end of summer now with autumn officially starting on March 1st. Of course it’s still pretty warm here. Unlike much of Australia, we didn’t have so many nasty fires around the Perth area. There was a big one in December but nothing of major note since then. We’ve been quite lucky in that respect. We did have some really hot weather in early December but temperatures this summer were mostly mild to moderate compared to years past. That makes three summer where it’s not been all that terrible.
What has been harsher is the humidity. When we first got our air conditioning back in 2002 or 2003, it worked really well here as the heat was mostly dry and only a few days in the summer caused it to work poorly for us. It’s an evaporative system which had been typical here but the number of humid days is getting a lot higher and so we end up having an ineffective cooling system. We have other issues with the current system we have so have ideas of changing it in the next year or two. I think it’s quite possible we may switch to a different type of system next time.
This week has been a stormy one and we’ve had a lot of rain over the few days. It started on Monday although we didn’t get rain where we live. I’d been expecting rain so avoided watering plants but then we didn’t get any. I finally watered plants on Tuesday morning and sure enough we had a big amount of rain dumped on us that afternoon. Well I think it was a big amount since I wasn’t home when it happened. It definitely was a dumping where the Scientist and I were. The storm cell seemed to weaken a bit before it got here so I think it was just a lot of rain and storminess but nothing too close.
Today the sun has come back out and it’s mostly big fluffy clouds although it’s still possible we’ll get more rain. After that it’s supposed to be dry for at least a few days.
Oh and the other thing that we’ve had trouble with here are the hot nights. Every night lately has been above 20C which is pretty unusual. especially when the daytime temperatures haven’t been super high.