Odds and ends.

[Outdated]

I'm getting used to driving around again and I've rediscovered just how much I like driving. I haven't gone very far yet, it's taking me a while to build up my internal map. I grew up in Adelaide but I grew up in the north of the city, now I'm living in the southern suburbs it's a whole new world all over again.

I revisited a beach I spent a lot of time at in my teenage years, the pub was right on the beach front and was open until midnight so it was a great place to be on a hot summer evening. Grange Beach.

Also on that beach front are some old English style terrace houses. They look beautiful but they're impossible to live in in summer. The poms didn't have much imagination when it came to architecture, for them putting verandas on the front was a wild innovation but they were still used to building so that walls and windows captured the heat of the sun. Once those walls heat up the inside of those buildings is like an oven, no airconditioning can counter it, the walls get hot to touch.

I went down to Victor Harbour again, I went very early in the morning thinking that weather conditions would be good for capturing a pretty sunrise, but that didn't really happen. The weather once again turned against me. I'm not sure exactly what sort of bird this is but she decided to nest right on the side of a footpath, she almost looks like a seagull but she's the size of a small eagle. I'll have to look at some bird identifiers later.

And a sign you don't see every day, it's because of a tourist operation giving people horse and camel drawn wagon rides over to the island.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

Did you enjoy seeing old familiar haunts? When I’ve gone back, the places I remember are almost unidentifiable.

That bird probably is a gull. They look bigger close up. There’s little frame of reference watching birds in the sky.

 

[Outdated]

Did you enjoy seeing old familiar haunts? When I’ve gone back, the places I remember are almost unidentifiable.

It's sort of disappointing in a way, to see how everything's changed and to remember a world that no longer exists.

That bird probably is a gull. They look bigger close up. There’s little frame of reference watching birds in the sky.

It turns out that she's a Great Black-Backed Gull and South Australia is way outside of their normal habitat according to Wiki. I've certainly never seen one before, if she sat on a normal seagull she'd squash it flat. There was a whole colony of them hanging around but I didn't get a picture that gives a good size reference.

Great black-backed gull - Wikipedia

 

[Jumpinbare]

I am astonished by old black and white pictures of early Florida town, with residents dressed in long sleeves and coats and ties out on the streets long before the invention of air conditioning. Pretty sure antiperspirants weren't invented yet either. I wonder how many cases of heat exhaustion resulted from the dress style.

 

[DrBadStrings]

I'm getting used to driving around again and I've rediscovered just how much I like driving. I haven't gone very far yet, it's taking me a while to build up my internal map. I grew up in Adelaide but I grew up in the north of the city, now I'm living in the southern suburbs it's a whole new world all over again.

I revisited a beach I spent a lot of time at in my teenage years, the pub was right on the beach front and was open until midnight so it was a great place to be on a hot summer evening. Grange Beach.


View attachment 136922

Also on that beach front are some old English style terrace houses. They look beautiful but they're impossible to live in in summer. The poms didn't have much imagination when it came to architecture, for them putting verandas on the front was a wild innovation but they were still used to building so that walls and windows captured the heat of the sun. Once those walls heat up the inside of those buildings is like an oven, no airconditioning can counter it, the walls get hot to touch.

View attachment 136923

I went down to Victor Harbour again, I went very early in the morning thinking that weather conditions would be good for capturing a pretty sunrise, but that didn't really happen. The weather once again turned against me. I'm not sure exactly what sort of bird this is but she decided to nest right on the side of a footpath, she almost looks like a seagull but she's the size of a small eagle. I'll have to look at some bird identifiers later.

View attachment 136924

And a sign you don't see every day, it's because of a tourist operation giving people horse and camel drawn wagon rides over to the island.

View attachment 136925

Australia looks like a great place. Love to visit someday. Thanks for sharing those photos and glad to hear you are getting back into the driving swing of things.

I used to love driving myself, especially at night, but the older I get not so much. Ever since these new modern super bright led headlights on cars I'm very nearly blinded if it's not daytime so I've had to limit my driving.

 

[tree]

Winters - Florida Climate Center



Contrary to popular belief, it does snow in Florida. The first documented account of snow in Florida was reported in 1774. During the Great Arctic Outbreak, which was responsible for one of the biggest widespread snow events in the state, snow measured up to 3 inches deep in numerous Panhandle communities, and snow flurries were reported as far south as Fort Myers. Since 1886, there have been more than 80 months in which at least a trace of snow has been reported somewhere in the state.

EXAMPLES OF FLORIDA SNOW EVENTS SINCE 1950
Date	Description
February 2, 1951	Two inches were reported in St. Augustine and Crescent City.
March 6, 1954	Four inches were reported at the Milton Experimental Station; this total holds as the 24-hour state snowfall record.
February 13, 1958	Rain changed to snow; 1.5 inches were reported in Jacksonville, and 2.8 inches reported in Tallahassee.
February 9-10, 1973	A large snowstorm that affected the Southeast U.S. brought 1.8 inches of snow in Pensacola on the 9th and 0.4 inches in Tallahassee on the 10th. Flurries were reported as far south as Lisbon and Clermont.
January 17-19, 1977	Snow started falling in Pensacola on the 17th. On the 19th, flurries were reported as far south as Homestead. Areas along I-4 (Tampa/Orlando) reported 1 to 2 inches of snow.
December 23, 1989	Rain changed to snow in Jacksonville, and totals of several inches were reported in some locations; the city had its first White Christmas.
March 12, 1993	The '93 Superstorm produced up to 4 inches of snow along the Florida Panhandle.
November 21, 2006	A dusting of snow fell over portions of central Florida, the first November snow in the state since 1912.
January 8-9, 2010	A light dusting of snow was seen in Jacksonville. Light snow fell in parts of central Florida with sleet/snow reported in Orlando, Tampa, and Melbourne. Flurries are reported in West Palm Beach and Kendall.
December 26, 2010	A mix of snow and sleet was reported in Jacksonville, with a freezing fog event around midnight. Tallahassee, Gainesville, and other locations in the northern peninsula reported flurries during the day.

 

[Outdated]

I wonder how many cases of heat exhaustion resulted from the dress style.

It depends a lot on humidity as well as temperature. I imagine there would have been a lot of heat stroke cases in people that hadn't lived there long enough to get properly acclimatised. I know it was the same here for early settlers, more so on the east coast where it's humid though, places with dry desert air don't feel as hot.

I used to love driving myself, especially at night, but the older I get not so much. Ever since these new modern super bright led headlights on cars I'm very nearly blinded if it's not daytime so I've had to limit my driving.

I'm 60 next birthday and the eyesight's certainly not what it used to be. I prefer driving at night though simply because of less traffic, I'm one of those annoying old farts that sits on 85 in the 100 zone.

That's mostly from too many wildlife encounters, I've never suffered much real damage but too many close calls for comfort. Dawn and dusk are the absolute worst times to be driving here, that's when most of the animals are on the move.

 

[Judge]

Did you enjoy seeing old familiar haunts? When I’ve gone back, the places I remember are almost unidentifiable.

I still recall when I went back to a town I lived in for just a couple of years as a child. I stuck a photograph of our home into the mailbox of whomever was living there at the time so many years later. LOL....it must have come as a shock for them to see their home in a state of construction in such an earlier time!

A bit sad when I think of another place I lived in even earlier than that, and apparently even our street no longer exists.

 

[Jumpinbare]

It depends a lot on humidity as well as temperature. I imagine there would have been a lot of heat stroke cases in people that hadn't lived there long enough to get properly acclimatised. I know it was the same here for early settlers, more so on the east coast where it's humid though, places with dry desert air don't feel as hot.

Florida humidity is alway very high except for a day or two after a cold front passes through.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

Winters - Florida Climate Center



Contrary to popular belief, it does snow in Florida. The first documented account of snow in Florida was reported in 1774. During the Great Arctic Outbreak, which was responsible for one of the biggest widespread snow events in the state, snow measured up to 3 inches deep in numerous Panhandle communities, and snow flurries were reported as far south as Fort Myers. Since 1886, there have been more than 80 months in which at least a trace of snow has been reported somewhere in the state.

​

EXAMPLES OF FLORIDA SNOW EVENTS SINCE 1950
Date	Description
February 2, 1951	Two inches were reported in St. Augustine and Crescent City.
March 6, 1954	Four inches were reported at the Milton Experimental Station; this total holds as the 24-hour state snowfall record.
February 13, 1958	Rain changed to snow; 1.5 inches were reported in Jacksonville, and 2.8 inches reported in Tallahassee.
February 9-10, 1973	A large snowstorm that affected the Southeast U.S. brought 1.8 inches of snow in Pensacola on the 9th and 0.4 inches in Tallahassee on the 10th. Flurries were reported as far south as Lisbon and Clermont.
January 17-19, 1977	Snow started falling in Pensacola on the 17th. On the 19th, flurries were reported as far south as Homestead. Areas along I-4 (Tampa/Orlando) reported 1 to 2 inches of snow.
December 23, 1989	Rain changed to snow in Jacksonville, and totals of several inches were reported in some locations; the city had its first White Christmas.
March 12, 1993	The '93 Superstorm produced up to 4 inches of snow along the Florida Panhandle.
November 21, 2006	A dusting of snow fell over portions of central Florida, the first November snow in the state since 1912.
January 8-9, 2010	A light dusting of snow was seen in Jacksonville. Light snow fell in parts of central Florida with sleet/snow reported in Orlando, Tampa, and Melbourne. Flurries are reported in West Palm Beach and Kendall.
December 26, 2010	A mix of snow and sleet was reported in Jacksonville, with a freezing fog event around midnight. Tallahassee, Gainesville, and other locations in the northern peninsula reported flurries during the day.

It depends on the latitude. Florida is a very long state. Snow in the north is not all that remarkable. Hard freezes are common.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

It's sort of disappointing in a way, to see how everything's changed and to remember a world that no longer exists.


It turns out that she's a Great Black-Backed Gull and South Australia is way outside of their normal habitat according to Wiki. I've certainly never seen one before, if she sat on a normal seagull she'd squash it flat. There was a whole colony of them hanging around but I didn't get a picture that gives a good size reference.

Great black-backed gull - Wikipedia

View attachment 136928

With more objects to compare it too, that is a big bird. Neat that you got to see one, if it’s out of its range.

 

[Outdated]

With more objects to compare it too, that is a big bird. Neat that you got to see one, if it’s out of its range.

I honestly don't trust Wiki in this. A massive proportion of our wildlife is undocumented and there's a truly incredible amount of documentary type videos about Australia that are all completely wrong, I think half of them are made by people that have never even visited the place. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that those gulls are also native to Australia but just not common around Adelaide.

When it comes to videos about Australia if they don't have a genuine Aussie accent then you can consider the whole video to be Fan Fiction.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

It is getting more and more difficult to figure out what is real and what is not real.

Perhaps Bill Bryson’s book on his Australian travels (In a Sunburned Country) would not appeal to someone actually living in Australia, but his descriptions of the species that have been lost and found and gone missing again is fascinating to me. A country so large, with so few humans in the interior.

Perhaps it is even more difficult in Australia to discern fact from fiction.

 

[MildredHubble]

They look beautiful but they're impossible to live in in summer.

I live in a similar house in the UK and it gets damn hot in the summer! I have no idea how anyone could survive the Australian heat in a house like that.

It gets rather cold in the winter too. They certainly created the worst of both worlds when they built them. On the other hand they are sturdy and may just manage to stay standing indefinitely.

I just installed some radiators on our top floor and it was amazing to think that I was the first person in perhaps 120 years to lift the floor boards and see what was underneath. Though, I did discover rather a lot of lead pipes. I've bypassed them now. It's strange to think that they have quite likely been there for a century, slowly leeching in to our water and rotting our brains

 

[Outdated]

Perhaps Bill Bryson’s book on his Australian travels (In a Sunburned Country) would not appeal to someone actually living in Australia,

I liked that book. I found it very entertaining and he did properly investigate everything he wrote about, one of the very few that does. He has a similar sense of humour to me, I never read much about him but he struck me as possibly starting out as a political journalist or similar.

Most half hear a story and then run with their own version of it. There's an amazing amount of youtube videos out there about Australia that are quite cringeworthy, many of them can't even show our flag and show New Zealand's instead, and they tell a story about the Australian Huntsman spiders but show pictures of American Tarantulas, etc.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

I liked that book. I found it very entertaining and he did properly investigate everything he wrote about, one of the very few that does. He has a similar sense of humour to me, I never read much about him but he struck me as possibly starting out as a political journalist or similar.

Most half hear a story and then run with their own version of it. There's an amazing amount of youtube videos out there about Australia that are quite cringeworthy, many of them can't even show our flag and show New Zealand's instead, and they tell a story about the Australian Huntsman spiders but show pictures of American Tarantulas, etc.

I’m glad you liked the Bryson book. You’re quite correct that he started out as a journalist. I am fond of his writing and sense of humor. I’ve read just about everything he has written.

I thought New Zealand and Australia were the same country. They’re right next to each other.

 

[Outdated]

I’m glad you liked the Bryson book. You’re quite correct that he started out as a journalist.

His blurb about our politicians in the beginning of the book is 100% true, the two biggest political clowns of the century were named Abbott and Costello. Abbott went on to become Prime Minister for a couple of years.