The Return of the Serpent

[izmeina]

Time waits for no-one. In the last few weeks, I am not sure when - Da Vinci Rowe - the best cartoonist in the universe has changed his trumpish Twitter icon (which I stole and used for this post) for this new masterpiece. He has also replaced his Twitter banner with the antics of Scomo and other locals

Yes. Just when Joe Biden decided to Make America Boring Again, the pale stale male Old Boy's Club of Oz picked up the trump Wanker baton and ran with it.

The Murdoch rags are now even resorting to bringing Cardinal Pell back into the fold. The creepy crawly got a huge piece of newspaper real estate to write about the real meaning of Easter. My skin crawled just seeing his name. I did read the thing and it was the usual nasty whiny longing for the good old days while bitching about the ABC. I bet the old bugger has got a Louise Milligan voodoo doll somewhere in his Vatican attic



So aside from all the political drama in Oz, there has also been the never ending summer which has left me pretty zonked and brain dead.

Twenty years ago, April in this bit of Oz used to be a bit on the chilly side with lots of crisp and crunchy cold foggy mornings.
Now it's just December lite. Last Monday it got to 39 celsius and there have been a few 35 degree days as well last week.

While at least Easter did not get cancelled this year, the annual street arts festival was and it was still too hot and muggy to do a decent bit of gardening.

So instead of feeling fresh and clear headed, all I want to do at night is just crawl into the serpent sack instead of squiggling online. These days I am at the Big Mac only about once a week and often even less. So not much squiggling gets done at all especially since the Tweet stone touch keyboard has developed some very nasty habits. Pressing the space bar will randomly move the cursor to the start of the previous sentence or middle of some random word, copy and paste the last paragraph, delete a word or two or on the very rare occasion it will just simply leave a blank spot.

Squiggling on Twitter has become a nightmare. Since they don't have anything resembling a preview button I have to check each tweet immediately after sending to check for errors. Often the last word or two will get chopped or a random word anywhere which often makes a tweet totally meaningless. So I delete and retweet the revised version only to see the original appear again. Often it will take 3 attempts to get it right and sometimes it never does so I choose to nuke completely or let the mess stand.

I still have not been able to work out if this is unique to Twitter or is a problem with Gboard everywhere. Trying to post on Dreamwidth using the Tweet Stone was already a frustrating experience and I have no desire to try with this new twist added

The other online distraction is Duolingo. They are now rationing the very low hanging fruit known as stories to 5 crowns for 4 new stories. I guess this had always been the case. It is just that when I signed up for them, I had so many crowns that I got given 40 stories in one hit.
One box that I would like to tick to add to my trophy collection is to finish the week as first in the Diamond league. Unfortunately, everyone else at that level has that item on their bucket list too. 3 weeks ago I went to bed one Sunday night thinking that I could just do an early morning sprint and 50 XP will be sufficient to overtake the leader at 550XP and get me that coveted Number 1 spot. But during the night some dodgy owl had clocked up 800 points and even scoring 3rd place was well out of reach.
I am lazy and do not use the keyboard input option or else I would have given up ages ago.

Hopefully the weather will cool down soon so that I can get my brain back and once again start lurking in Cyberia, reading other people's posts in DW land and even replying to them now and again

Proper serpents come alive in summer and turn into sun baked zombies in the cold weather so I maybe I am channeling some other creature entirely

Comments

[ozfille]

You got the weather we had last year, this year. Summer here has been more pleasant here, very few extreme days. It was March and the flooding in large parts of the state as well as in the Hawkesbury/Nepean floodplains to the west of Sydney that caused more problems.

Wacky Weather

[izmeina]

So you have escaped the floods in your patch of Sydney? I did get the impression that the Wild West of Sydney was badly affected

I also had the impression that the areas that were most badly flooded were also the ones that had the worst bush fires in December 19/ January 20

I have a couple bulbs of garlic for planting but still waiting for the weather to cool down a bit more before planting them. All those green thumbs keep saying that growing garlic is so easy that even a kid could do it. I'm a bit older than that but never had any luck. The green shoots turn up and then die off but there's never much underneath them. At least I have much better luck with turmeric. If I had known that ginger would have stayed so expensive for so long, I would have planted a bit of that back in December.

Re: Wacky Weather

[ozfille]

The inner city other than around the Marrickville area (built on an ex-swamp) and near the Cooks River rarely floods unless there are leaves blocking the drains, but the councils are better these days in making sure that doesn't happen and sometimes near big storm drains with really heay downpours there might be a bit of flooding, but its fairly rare. It's out in the western Hawkesbury flood plains that most of the trouble usually occurs around Sydney. Governor Macquarie back in the early 19th Century was always trying to move the settlers away from there. They knew back then the problems of living on a flood plain, but then all the valleys up and down the coast where people congregate are flood plains.

Yup the North Coast where even the rainforests burnt were the most badly effected by the floods, but then the fires burnt across the mountains and coastal areas from almost north to south last summer with the exception of a few patches of bush around Sydney spared the flames.

With the lack of people to pick a lot of crops there will be a lot of it rotting in the fields and prices for fruit and vegies will go up and with the return of the rain most pastoralists will be keeping back their stock for breeding now there is plenty of grass. Also the grasshopper and mouse plagues have munched through a large portion of grain and vegetable crops as well. The farmers were hoping the heavy rains may have drowned the mice but I gather there was not enough to get right down into their burrows underground in some place so they are still swarming biting people and their babies and scaring their cats and giving them bad rodent diseases. I've seen pictures of a carpet of mice swarming across the land at night. Very creepy!