Floods and Pizza Knee
The last week of "work" was going uneventfully with the University winding up on Thursday at 1700hrs for the next couple of weeks. Mother nature had other things in mind...
Planning to stock up on lollies in preparation for Star Gate marathon #2, I checked the doppler radar just before leaving to see if the yucky looking weather outside was going to deliver anything interesting. I had to leave early to get to the lolly shop before it closed and on the weather radar, the dark maroon blob crossing the city looked to be moving slowly enough for me to beat it home. Maroon means ludicrously heavy rain rate.
Anyway, I got about 2 km along my ride (I bike everywhere, no car) when the familiar feeling of a gust front caressed my bare face. I thought that it felt portentious enough to take cover and it's a good thing that I did. Ducking around a corner, I found a factory with an overhang deep enough to keep the worst of the weather off.
The torrent commenced and deluged the streets. Within 5 minutes, the street was starting to back up with water and the spray whipping around the building was soaking me. Sheets of rain tracked across the water-coated road and pea-sized hail splashed in the puddles ominously slithering around the edges of the building, encroaching on my dry space. Then, the centre of the storm passed and the wind changed, necessitating a crossing of the street to keep out of the worst of the weather. In the twenty seconds required to cross the street, everything I was wearing was dripping with water and I'd puddled (pun intended) through ankle deep water (that's ankle deep on my bike) to the cover of another factory overhang. There I rode out the rest of the storm.
When the torrent subsided to a trickle, I ventured back out into the street and found the cars at the nearby train station submerged to mid-way up their windscreens, emergency personnel chest deep rescuing people from their stricken cars, and employees from nearby factories sweeping water out onto the street. A lady was taking photos of the flood looking up toward the university. Pointing in the other direction I said,
"You should check out the cars at the station, they're submerged up to their windscreens!"
She replied, "Yeah, those are our cars."
"Oh, damn," I said.
24 mm (1 inch) of rain fell in about 30 minutes. I seem to have escaped the university just at the right time... the ground floor of the Earth Science building flooded and the few who were remaining when the storm blew through stayed another hour and a half sweeping water from the hallways. In a follow-up e-mail from administration yesterday, something like 25 of 100 buildings on campus weren't flooded.
My shoes got wet.
Fast forward to Friday morning: I went to the gym before heading south to commence two solid and glorious days of Star Gating to various planets in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies. After finishing my workout, I headed off and heard the train announcement voice, which meant that my train was coming sooner than expected. In my rush for the momentarily departing train, I tripped over my shoe laces and left behind a lump of skin on the train platform. My left knee was the worst for the encounter. To be fair, I had my bike, bag, and helmet all in various locations surrounding me.
It was one of those scrapes that stays bloodless for a while... it must be that your body is in shock trying to work out how to punish you enough for such a transgression on the vanity of its largest organ. It bled and leaked a lot and with antiseptic powder and vitamin E oil covering it, it now looks a lot like a margherita (tomato sauce and cheese with spices) pizza. Now I'll have matching knees... I did my right knee scree skiing in a gravel pit when I was 15 or something and now the left one will have some scrabbly scar tissue. Yeah!
Merry Christmas! Love you all.
New Zealand Revisited
In the absence of something more present and immediate, I'm resorting to some highlights from my skiing trip to New Zealand in September.
The first is a series covering a uniquely kiwi, alpine bird called the "kea". If you have an astonishingly acute memory, you'll remember that invertedonwinch.blogspot.com did a short feature on these inquisitive birds. They get into everything and will steal/tear/shred anything they find particularly interesting: wiper blades, ski racks, rings, necklaces, watches, bright and sparklies...
Normally they are verdant green with a sharply hooked beak and into everything:
We named this one Freaky Beak for obvious reasons. He's obviously survived on the backs of generous skiers/snowboarders:
Next is a shameless study of the wonderfully different climo-geography of south island New Zealand. (I must really be suffering the inexorable march toward academicky-ness, I've just created my own hyphenated compound noun.) If you ever needed a picture defining the term "snow line", NZ is the country in which to get it.
Last is me standing over Lake Ohau beside Queenstown atop one of The Remarkables in the rather un-remarkable The Remarkables ski area (heh). It was icy, icy, icy, which normally doesn't bother me, but the lack of snow make it difficult to ski on.
Dichotomous Temperature
As I lie on my bed tonight at 0002 and look at the temperature reading 23 degrees, I can't help but feel a twinge of longing for the bundle of clothing that I would otherwise be wearing, were I home in Canada. The Internet tells me that it is currently -24 degrees at Red Deer airport and all the news that I follow is saying that Environment Canada is predicting the coldest winter in 13 years.
Those who know me well would know that I'm honest in my longing for frigidity, and I would gladly trade the last couple of week's worth of 30 degree scorchers for the comfort of my insulated coveralls. Alas, the glass of 2005 Ridells Creek shiraz in the late afternoon heat today did help to cool off my heat-frazzled nerves, as it hit 33 degrees in Melbourne at 1524 today. Thank goodness there isn't much humidity, and thank doubly-goodness that my new place has air conditioning. I think it is interesting that Australia would be one of the few places where the hardy could build a house without a heater, but where the hardy would rather choose a cooling device. We have evaporative cooling in the house, which is an interesting take on cooling... There's no refrigeration, just a unit that evaporates water to steal heat from the air. You have to keep windows open to allow the highly humidified air out, else you face a wet and sticky house. But, it is more energy efficient than a compressor driven air conditioning system that we are all used to and that so few of us need in Canada.
The flies are a bit nuts, comparatively, this year. There have been a few wind storms so far this summer, which bring not only the heat from the Outback, but also the flies. There's nothing quite like them in Canada, but to have a small idea, replace all the mosquitoes buzzing about in early evening during a wet summer with buzzing black flies and that would be pretty close. There are mozzies, but much smaller in the typically drier parts of Australia, like Victoria. But flies, flies, flies... whewpf. The Australian salute is like a swiping swat meant to tackle a fly. Beware the bloody flies mate. However, they are better than mozzies... they go to bed at sundown, they don't bite, and they don't carry malaria. All hail the Australian fly.
Speaking of flying, I tried to go yesterday, but the winds were from the north and furious. Gusting over 25 knots and hitting 38 knots aloft. That's not weather for an ultralight to grace the air, and it didn't cease all day. There's a nifty new Texan on the line at FlySports... it's an updated model with counterbalances on its already light pitch controls, a sliding manual trim system, the beautiful bubble canopy, and a Dynon EFIS D100 instrument package.
The EFIS (electronic flight information system) is a non-certified system (in GA airplanes) for flight information. The D100 is multifunction capable, giving everything in one 7 inch panel: attitude, altitude, airspeed, vertical speed, directional gyro, set headings, waypoints, drift, winds aloft, etc. It's marvellous. The only clue that you aren't working with a normal, albeit extraordinary, EFIS panel is the lack of gyro whine when you turn it on.
There are no gyros in it. It's all solid state sensors: 3 solid-state magnetometers on mutually perpendicular axes, 3 solid-state (huh?) accelerometers on mutually perpendicular axes, pitot static and dynamic air sources. It didn't occur to me until I'd finished the flight that the odd thing about it was the lack of instrument noise before I started up.
The instrument reads direction just like a directional gyro, but once you calibrate it on the ground to the compass and input the variation, the instrument maintains that setting, doesn't precess like gyro instruments do, and only needs to be re-set on a scheduled instrument maintenance schedule. After power failure, the instrument can do a full reset and give attitude information within 2 seconds of turning on. It maintains a backup battery that will last 1.5 to 2 hours following full power loss even so. Wow! This type of solid-state technology is surely the future of GA and commercial avionics.
It demands precision though... there's no slop like pressure-driven analog instruments have. What a trip.
Good night! Glad I finally found something at least a bit interesting to write to you about. Thanks for tuning in.
Oh, if you have never watched Stargate SG-1, do. Now.
