Midsummer in January

Thank you for comments! Generous comments, too, thanks!

I last blogged in November. I get distracted easily from updating. I go online and there are so many ways to go, so many fascinating things to learn, so many pictures to see and stories and news items to read. And suddenly ¡flooolf! an hour or several hours have evaporated, a fair thwack of it just waiting for pages to load up.

Fingal, you see, really is rural. It's beautiful here and we love it, but we don't have broadband easily available. Reasonably priced broadband doesn't even seem likely. Sigh. But we have clean air and distances to see into, and the winds blow from the four quarters: at 41°38'S 147°58'E we're in the path of the Southern roaring forties.

At the moment I'm making the delicious decision of what photie fresh from the garden to share with you. The bean patch? the plum tree? the nashis? Can I get them all? maybe more? ... yes, this looks like the one. Here are pumpkins, too, and even the clothes tree which bears prolific crops year round as well as the aromatic yellow-flower'd curry plant.

almost summer

Back to my Taswegian blog. Both winter and spring have come and gone, well, nearly gone in the case of spring. December 1st sees the official arrival of summer here.

Where has the year gone and how has it sped by so quickly? Perhaps there's a conspiracy amongst the gods of time to speed up time. Perhaps we're getting old. Perhaps both.

Today's been an odd day starting out overcast then warming up to a lovely intermittently sunny 20°c 68°f. In the early afternoon the temperature dropped to 10°c 50°f and a couple of squally stormlets moved through. I thought we were possibly finished with the wood fire until autumn this coming April or May, but we decided to get some warmth in here and I got the fire going. We had a laugh at each other, Stuart and I: a couple of years ago we'd likely have toughed it out in a cooling house.

The time gods are innocent. We're getting old.

Tilling the lower 40

A new member of my wee puter farm arrived the other day and I've been lavishing my attention on the now fastest computer of the 6 remaining live ones. I murdered an older computer the other day when I didn't notice its processor fan had stopped.

It was a Pentium 233MMX, and short of mouth to mouth, I tried my best to resuscitate it, but alas it remained, if not dead, decidedly skittish about functioning reliably.

The new addition to the farm arrived flash in black instead of beige and I've been playing with it since. It's crunching SETIs from Berkeley at the moment, helping out the older farm puters, while the other 2 fastest puters are crunching Stanford's folding at home. My heart is torn between the two distributed computing projects with my first love SETI winding down into BOINC and my new love folding@home performing perhaps a more immediate service to my fellow man.

Sunday sunset

Sunday's sunset was so spectacular I gawped until it was nearly over before I grabbed the camera.

We get these often.

Sunday midday

Winter begins officially here Wednesday, 1 June. While meteorologically winter doesn't start until the June Solstice — known and loved throughout the northern hemisphere as the Summer Solstice — here it's deemed best to keep track of the four seasons by starting them off the first day of the solstice'd or equinox'd month.

The last couple of days here in tassieland we got the full winter treatment in terms of cold & wind, even running to snow in the highlands and some not-so-high areas.

During extreme conditions like these we naturally we get weather warnings from our Bureau of Meteorogy. Particularly during cold and windy conditions, sheep grazier warnings are issued which sometimes come out as sheep warnings. The sheep warnings are my favorite with the mental image of sheep tumbling arse over teakettle before Antarctic blasts.

Today things have moderated. Now that I've paid quick attention to my new blogger persona, I'm off to spend the rest of our late autumn Sunday afternoon in Sunday mode.

First post

G'day, blog-reading world.

After trekking through profiles and settings, downloading software to upload my downloaded photies, and trying to remember why I wanted to blog in the first place, I'll keep this my very first blog short.

It may come naturally for me to keep my writing efforts brief. I still remember the only sentence of my first essay, grade 8. It was, "The Assyrians swept through Mesopotamia after 2400 B.C." I decided against more detail and handed it in.

While these days I can forego abrupt summaries, tonight I'll leave this initial posting at greeting the blogging world and welcoming my entry into it.

I'm looking forward to the journey.