Preparing for this year's New Year's letter brings a problem: what photo motive should we use? Yesterday we decided to do a repeat, and today we managed it with relatively little
difficulty. Here ten years ago, and then today:
I was expecting for us to look much older and more decrepit, but to my surprise, today's
photo looks better. We should consider repeating the photos of 10 years ago as time goes
on.
Yvonne off to town a day early for the weekly shopping.
Somehow Christmas is meaning less and less every year, but at least we can eat something
special. Goose? Out of the question in Australia, but surely we can find a duck, which
would be a better choice from the size point of view. But no, not even a duck! How boring
Australian food has become! How meaningless Christmas has become!
That's quite a solid gate, and it's in the middle of the paddocks, where nothing much can
get at it. Yvonne thinks kangaroos, but I don't think that
even a horse could have done that damage. She was harrowing two days ago, and she could have done the damage with the car or the harrow, but she
would have noticed that, and it would be unlikely that she would have hit it exactly in the
middle.
What do we do? Reposition the chain that keeps it shut; currently it's too tight.
The next couple of days will pose an extreme fire danger, so we're keeping our eyes on
emergency.vic. Oh, no, that's just the URL. The real name is Vic Emergency. And because of the danger, they're
even more obfuscated than usual. Today I saw:
That's us in the middle. Why is the map orange? I haven't found anything on this appalling
app that tells me what the colours mean, but in the Grampians it represents the
most dangerous parts of the 5 or 6 bushfires, totalling about 440 km², that are still not
under control. Even the normal 2 bushfires 30 m apart are only on a greenish-yellow
background:
I tried selecting it, but ended up in a loop. People, this is a matter of life and death.
The reporting is broken, and has been for at least 14 years. In that time, the biggest changes have been gratuitous changes to
the way information has been reported, including moving the web site I still can't get a
report on things that endanger me (or just about anybody else in my area). I still
get house fires and six-month-old chicken flu warnings.
Only one possible thing might explain some of the problems. Why am I getting “incidents”
for the South-Western fire district? My 20 km radius “watch zone” barely cuts into the
South-Western district:
Could that be the reason? Tried to reduce it to 19 km, but no, the app is too clever for
that and only goes in 5 km decrements. And when I tried it, all such warnings had gone
away, though in the meantime I had also received some for the North Central district,
suggesting that it was only a coincidence.
Yet another Christmas Day with almost nothing to show for itself. We didn't even cook
anything special, just leftover Wiener Schnitzel from Sunday. But
then, it seems that there's a certain tradition there too: we also ate leftovers in
1965 and 2019.
Somehow it seems that festivals like Christmas belong to a time when basic items like food
cost more of a family budget than they do today.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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