Thursday's News

Life continues along quietly and is a little mundane. I have tried to help one of the other members of the Computer Club with her laptop. We have had some success. Most mornings I get to take a bike ride and like to get about 10 kilometres in. Then I have a quick swim in the pool to freshen up but water temps of about 20 make this swim quite 'refreshing' and usually quite quick!

We are entering the 'summer storm' season where tropical thunderstorms sweep across the area dropping heaps of rain with plenty of thunder and lightning. These storms can also have the thunder and lightning but you can miss on the rain. The photo to the right is taken from my desktop and shows the local weather bureau radar which we can get on our PC. There is a link to the current radar available in a link on the right of this page. (6. Brisbane Weather Radar Loop) The more red and yellow means the heavier the rain will be. As you can see we were in line for a storm last night. The storm direction was to the north east so Caloundra was right in its path! I had spread some lawn fertilizer on the front lawn late in the day on the promise we would get some overnight rain which would soak it in to the ground.

Our soil here is poor and it needs as much feed as it can get to encourage the grass to grow!

I was watching a soccer match on TV as the storm approached between Australia and Qatar, it was a World Cup 2010 qualifier match. It had been delayed by 30 minutes as the storm passed through Brisbane! The game was telecast on our satellite PayTV (Austar) and as the thick storm clouds rolled by overhead, the satellite TV signals were unable to penetrate it so we lost signal for about 10 minutes until the heaviest part of the storm had passed through. This morning I saw we had 38mls (about an inch and a half) in my rain gauge! Our rainfall continues to be just above average for this time of year. We are about a month's rainfall ahead of where we should be.

In a few days I will probable need to mow the lawn!

The current difficult financial situation is always in our minds at the moment as hard earned retirement benefits evaporate.

Recently my scanner 'died'. I didn't use it a lot but it was handy to have. A new scanner would cost about $150 so we had decided to live without one for the moment. Nowadays you don't buy a scanner, you by a 'multifunction printer'. This is a printer which can scan, copy and print all in the one machine. I bought one of these for $60. The printer companies make their profit not from the sale of the machine, but from the prices they charge for ink refills. Ink refills cost more than the price of the machine.

The multifunction printer is the one with the black face.

My other printer uses ink refills I can purchase for about $2 each. (These are not 'genuine' cartridges but do the job for me!) Cartridges for the new machine cost over $30 each (one for black and another for color). So I am keeping the old printer for all my basic printing and using the new machine for scanning and copying!

We have dark skies overhead at the moment with more rain imminent! I may have to adjust my overnight rainfall figures if we get much more. It is just after 7 am as I type!