Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I arrived in Brisbane from Dallas on time, and then my flight to Perth left and arrived on time. My bags came through fine, and my DH was waiting at the airport for me to drive me home.

After unpacking, I had to shutdown and bench the server as it had been running loud pretty much the whole time I was away, said my DH. It was definitely louder than usual. Once I had it open on the bench, I saw that the front intake air panel was covered in dust, so I spent the next 30+ minutes cleaning it thoroughly — when I restarted it, it purred along without the loud fan noise, so dust was the culprit. I really didn’t need that task right then as I was tired and hot, but it’s done and I don’t have to worry about that excessive noise any more.

We went out to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner, then I tried to watch an hour of TV, but completely missed the program as I kept drifting off to sleep 😉 I went to bed at 9:30, woke at 2:30 am, drifted in and out of sleep until 5:15 am, when I got up. Hopefully, the jet lag will be minimal…

Today will be spent catching up on the last two weeks’ worth of mail, entering receipts and statements, paying bills, doing grocery shopping, unpacking all my sewing stuff etc. I start work again tomorrow. And life will go back to normal.

About 4:15 yesterday afternoon (15 February 2013), I was working hard editing a document for my client when my husband mentioned that he could see quite a bit of smoke. A few minutes earlier we’d heard a couple of planes go by quite close. I commented that I wasn’t surprised about the smoke as there had been about 20 fires further south from us in the past three days as a result of lightning strikes from a summer electrical storm and there had been warnings about smoke throughout the south-west. One of those fires was really close to Bridgetown, where we used to live; my fear of bushfires was the reason we left Bridgetown three years ago after a fire had come really close to the town four summers ago.

But his comment about smoke reminded me to look at the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) website (http://www.dfes.wa.gov.au/alerts/Pages/default.aspx) to see what the current alerts were. This website is a godsend in summer for anyone who lives in Western Australia, as it reports fires, floods, cyclones etc. and I guess I would look at it a few times each day during summer.

I was gobsmacked — according to the website there was a bushfire really close to where we live, and people in the area just north of us were being told to leave their houses NOW; we were on the WATCH and ACT level. I went outside and could see the plume of smoke quite clearly, not far to the north-east of us. I also felt a breeze coming from the south-west, so figured that if the breeze didn’t shift, we would be OK as the fire was burning away from us.

Above: Google satellite image of where we live (orange home icon) and where the fire was (red A marker), with the distance legend from this map. It looks like the fire was about 1 to 2 km from our house on the other side of the highway. Note all the bushland south of the fire — thank goodness the breeze was from the south-west and not the north or north-east!

Above: Note the pattern of the paddocks/ponds in the lower centre of the photo taken from the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) spotter plane and compare them to the Google satellite image. (Source: DEC photo from http://www.perthnow.com.au)

Above: Plume as seen from Bunbury, some 25 km away (source: http://www.thewest.com.au).

What to do? Well, surprisingly, I wasn’t panicked. Our biggest threat was going to be embers, so I connected the hose and started watering the thatched roof of our Bali hut near the house and the brushwood fences. I also started the retic system manually to get water onto the lawns and gardens closest to the house — to hell with water restrictions at a time like this! I got out all the other hoses and connected them too — they would never save the house, but they could be useful if there were embers.

Over the next two and a half hours, I kept the retic system on, ultimately soaking most of the gardens and lawns on our property. I had a couple of calls from people I knew in Bridgetown letting me know that there was a fire close by (they monitor that DFES website like hawks!), and a phone call from my nephew who passed through the area on his way south for the weekend. I also contacted a neighbour to let her know that there was a fire close by — she already knew about it as she’d got an alert on her phone from the emergency alert system. More about that later…

Meantime, I packed up my client’s laptop, synched my laptop and packed it up, grabbed my most recent backup drive (from the previous night) for the server, grabbed my ‘Vital Info’ folder that I’d created when we lived in Bridgetown (passports, copies of ID, property titles, wills, insurance docs etc.), some basics like toiletries and clothes and underwear, and put two big woollen blankets in the boot of the car. If we needed to evacuate, I was ready.

While all this was going on, we were being buzzed continuously by water bombers and helitacs (helicopters with long snorkels/trunks designed to pick up lots of water and drop it on fire), some coming over our house quite low. I found out later that there were 7 water bombers and 2 helitacs, plus a spotter plane from DEC monitoring the direction and dimensions of the fire. Those guys were tireless! For two to three hours they were in the air, back and forth over the fire, dropping water/foam on it. I think they even made a last sortie after probably being told to stand down because of fading light as the sun had been down for a bit when the last ones flew overhead.

In that two to three hours, the fire went from a nasty plume in the sky (the pictures I took were as the plume was diminishing, not at the height of the blaze — I was too busy to take photos!!!) to almost nothing. There is no way that people on the ground alone could have extinguished that blaze in that time, no matter what resources they had. I believe that fighting the fire from the air like that was the only effective way to put out the worst of that fire. Sure, the ground crews are needed for establishing containment lines and fighting spot fires, and I have nothing but admiration for them all — especially as many are volunteers, but I really think that those water bombers and helitacs were what stopped this fire from getting out of hand.

By 8 pm last night the fire threat for us had been downgraded to ADVICE. We dodged a bullet.

(Click a photo to view it at a larger size)

Above and below: Plume from our backyard. Much less than it had been about an hour before.

Above: Plume behind our shed. Thatching on Bali hut on the right was quite soaked by now.

Above: Water bomber later in the afternoon–plume is dissipating now

Emergency Services Levy

I know there was a lot of complaint some years ago when the State government decided to add an emergency services levy to ALL property rates. I never complained about it, as funding emergency services, especially volunteer groups such as the SES, all volunteer fire brigades etc. with cake stalls just doesn’t cut it. There needs to be sufficient finance to staff DEC and DFES with permanent firefighters, and to provide equipment like water bombers and helitacs and their highly trained crews, and sufficient funds to provide equipment and training to the tireless volunteer fire brigades in this vast state of ours. It was only a few years ago that our state had NONE of these aerial firefighting instruments. After yesterday’s experience, I was ready to donate to those who keep these things flying! Unfortunately, as it’s a government-funded thing, there’s no way to donate, so I’ll likely donate to my local bushfire brigade.

Emergency Alert System

I mentioned earlier about the Australia-wide emergency alert system and how most of my neighbours got text or recorded messages on their mobile phones or landlines. I got nothing. After everything had settled down, I decided to investigate.

The FAQ page for mobile phones on the Emergency Alert website (http://www.emergencyalert.gov.au/frequently-asked-questions/how-will-it-work-on-mobile-phones.html) gave several reasons why I might not have received a message. I decided to investigate the one about the phone provider not having my street address. I went on to Telstra’s 24/7 online chat and found out that my mobile phone was linked to a street address I’d left some six years ago! The reason is that all my account information is sent to my PO Box, so I never knew that it was linked to a street address too and that I needed to change that when I’d changed the details for the PO box each time we’d moved. Well, I know now! The Telstra lady changed the street address immediately (after doing a security confirmation with me), so in case this sort of thing ever happens again, I should get an alert.

I’ll contact my landline provider today and make sure they have my street address too, as I didn’t get a message via the landline either. Again, that bill is sent to my PO box.

However, the mobile should still have got the message as we are in the cell area for where the fire was. That said, we are in a bit of a black hole where we are, and the signal isn’t always available, so perhaps that’s why it didn’t work. It worked for my nephew though — he got the message as he was driving through the area. I followed up with my nephew a few days later — he DIDN’T get any message as he was driving through the area; he only saw the smoke and emergency service vehicles and people who had been evacuated hanging at the end of the roads.  He knew where we lived so called me.

So, if you get your phone bills sent to a PO Box, contact your phone provider and make sure your correct street address is attached to your number, otherwise the emergency alert system may not work for you just when you need it to.

Update: I contacted my landline provider (iinet) and they checked the database for their wholesaler (Telstra) and yes, my street address is correctly recorded in that database. However, the iinet customer support person suggested I contact Telstra anyway to make sure. So I used the 24/7 live chat facility on Telstra. The customer support person couldn’t access that database, but she did say she’d ask why my landline didn’t receive a call assuming the street address was correct. Here’s what she found out and emailed me:

I have looked into the emergency notifications for you, and the reason you would have not received a landline notification is due to the fact they are only available to full Telstra Services. Because your phone line rental is through iiNet, we are unable to provide this service for you.

WTF?? Just because my landline phone is with a different provider, I can’t get emergency alerts on it??? I’ll be following this up, starting with iinet.

Update 20 October 2015: I couldn’t recall the outcome when I followed up iinet last time, so I called them again today. No-one seems to know… The customer support person at iinet looked up a database and told me that my name, landline and mobile numbers, and current address were all listed correctly (he confirmed each bit of info with me), and he *assumed* that as that database is used by emergency services that I would get alerts on my landline and an SMS on my mobile if I ever needed it. However, he didn’t know for sure, and there was no way he could find out. I guess the only way I’ll know if it works is if there’s an emergency close by and I get an alert! At that point I’ll know if it works. Not a very satisfactory outcome. I’d much rather know that I’d be contacted than be left in the dark as to whether I would be or not.

I was checking out exercise bikes the other day when I came across these ‘penguin bikes’. According to the sales guy, some people were buying these as combination bikes and bar stools so their guests could exercise while having a beer etc. 😉

While these were cute, they had no facility for adding resistance, checking heart rate etc. so I bought a conventional one.

I was only writing about the ‘big bad banksia men’ the other day, not realising that today is May Gibbs‘ birthday — May Gibbs wrote and illustrated all those great Australian children’s books about Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and the big bad banksia men.

Well, Google Australia have honoured her birthday with a great Google Doodle. As non-Australians are unlikely to see it, I’ve copied it here for those of you who can’t view www.google.com.au today.

We moved to our current house almost three years ago (3-year anniversary late next month). The gardens were all landscaped with waterwise, drought-resistant plants, and lots of bark mulch in between, but as the retic didn’t work properly for the first month or two (in the hottest part of the summer), some plants suffered and died.

One of these was just a stick in the ground with a few dead twigs for branches. I’d tried to pull it out a few times, but it was stuck fast. It wasn’t in anyone’s way, so I left it where it was, figuring that one day I’d ask my husband to help me pull it out and dispose of it.

Imagine my surprise when I was in that area of the garden the other day (also the middle of summer) and saw some green leaves sprouting on this ‘dead’ stick! I’m not a big gardener, but they look a bit like avocado leaves to me — yum, if they are!

I can’t believe how tenacious this plant is — it’s been dead for three years, and now suddenly it sprouts some leaves! It’s getting no more water than in the previous two summers, and it hasn’t been fertilised. So I have no idea why it decided to spring back to life now. But I’m glad it did.

It’s the one in the foreground with the ‘dead’ stem and the mop top of leaves.

Another tenacious plant is this banksia:

Banksia: BIG tree/plant on the left

Why is it tenacious? Well, it didn’t exist three years ago. I can’t remember when I first saw the tiny seedling pop its head out of the ground, but it was maybe 18 months/two years ago. I didn’t pull it out as it was far enough away from the driveway that it wouldn’t do any damage if it grew a bit. Of course, there are dozens — if not hundreds — of species of banksia in Australia, so I had no idea what this one was nor whether it would become a smallish bush or a decent-sized tree.

Guess what? it’s a decent-sized tree! It’s well over three metres tall, and has had absolutely NO care and attention (except watering via the sprinkler system twice a week in summer). That’s what’s so great about native plants — they just grow in the environments they are native to.

This banksia has even produced some juvenile ‘big bad banksia men’ seed pods, which you can see in the picture below (there are two).

The diameter of the trunk is about two hands-width around, so it’s a pretty decent size. Hopefully it will offer some shade on the driveway as it gets bigger — since our beautiful tuart tree had to be cut down, we’ve had no shade that visitors can park under.

(I just noticed that the picture of the hole where the tuart tree used to be — the last picture on this page — has the banksia in it [far left in that picture]! That picture was taken in June 2012, some six months ago. Boy, the banksia has grown a LOT in that time!)

Update 28 October 2013

Some 10 months later and look at these plants now! The banksia appears to be about 4 metres tall, and the avocado tree is flowering — I hope that’s a good sign! We had a LOT of rain last month, so that’s helped all the plants thrive.

I was in the garden this morning, and one of the chickens that normally lives in the neighbour’s coop over the back fence was out and about. She came up to the fence, then decided to pop into our yard to see what was on offer, before popping back on to her side of the fence. I wonder how often she does that???

Shall I or shan’t I?

Maybe…

Yes, I think I will

Slim pickings here. I guess I’d better get back to my side of the fence.

We’ve copped a bit of a beating overnight — lots of lightning and thunder and now quite a bit of rain. Fortunately the wind is not fierce — yet. It’s meant to pick up later this morning.

Here’s a satellite image of our area (we’re near Bunbury) about 15 minutes ago — the pinks, blues and purples are the lightning strikes:

And the radar also about 15 mins ago — light green is lighter rain; yellow is heavy rain:

And 11 hours later… Nothing much has changed. The weather system seems to be just going around and around in the one spot and not moving out to sea or inland as it normally does. Are we in some sort of 12/12/12/ vortex? 😉 Here are the satellite and radar pictures from about 4:30 pm the same day:

However, the wind has picked up a bit and a LOT of rain has been dumped on the region. For example, Harvey has had more than 100 mm of rain, Bunbury close to 50 mm (now over 100 mm), and Myalup some 80 mm. All these places are within 30 km of where I live, so we’ve likely received between 50 and 80 mm of rain — that’s two to three inches in the old money 😉 And it’s December — we rarely get rain in December, so to get massive amounts of it is very unusual. In fact, it’s very unusual to get that sort of rainfall even in the middle of winter, which is when most of our annual rain falls.

Update 13 December 2012: Just to show how much rain we’ve had in the past two days, here’s a summary of our recent days and annual averages (notice too, the temperature drop!):

I took the photos below on December 12 (I think) in a break in the rain. You can see how heavily laden the sky is, but what I really liked was the line of bright white clouds trying to creep in 😉

I’ve only just got around to taking these photos off my phone. I took them on 9 November 2012, around 11:30 am on my drive home from the Post Office. The sky was just amazing! The clouds streaked across the sky from one side to the other and it seemed like I was in the middle of it all — the streaks were centred on a point to the west and when I turned to the east, they were centred on another point in the east!

I’m sure there’s probably a scientific name for this phenomenon (anyone know?), but I was so taken with the majesty of it, I just had to take some photos.

Click a photo to view it larger.

Sky looking west towards the Indian Ocean

Looking at the middle section

Looking east

After our last toaster nearly blew up the house (!), I bought a Sunbeam 4-slice toaster (‘Toastum’ model 6410) about 14 months ago from Harvey Normans for about $70 (not the cheapest toaster, but not the most expensive either). Sunbeam has always been a reputable brand, in my eyes, but these days everything seems to be made in China or somewhere where labour is cheap so I’m not sure that brand reputation means all that much anymore.

I’ve only used the toaster maybe once a week, and my husband doesn’t use it at all — I’m the only one who’s ever used it. So perhaps it has toasted bread/naan bread maybe 50 or so times. I learnt early on that it had to be plugged into the power and the power turned on before the handle would go down and engage. Even then, sometimes the handle is tricky and I have to press it down hard a couple of times to get it to stay down (see someone else’s rant about this toaster’s handle here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/melb.general/LZMyj8pdXq4 and other reviews here: http://www.productreview.com.au/p/sunbeam-toastum-ta6210-ta6410.html).

Well, after about 50 uses, the handle snapped off the other day! That is, the plastic handle piece that goes over the metal lever. This handle piece is ‘painted’ the same as the stainless steel of the toaster, so I had assumed it was also metal, but no — it’s plastic! And it snapped right off. I now have a useless toaster.

I checked the warranty, and guess what? It’s only for 12 months, and this happened about 14 months after purchase. I figured I’d at least call the Sunbeam support line to see what I could do, and whether taking it back to Harvey Normans would be an option. Well, I got such a surprise!

I told the support guy what model toaster and that the handle had snapped off. And he immediately said he’d send me out a replacement and asked me for my postal address! No questions about how it happened, no discussion of the toaster being out of warranty, nothing.

So either this is a known issue for Sunbeam or else they are aware that social media and internet reviews can really damage their reputation. Whatever. I just know that I was impressed with the helpful and ‘no questions asked’ response I got from their customer support person. Well done, Sunbeam!

Would I buy another Sunbeam toaster? Maybe. And that decision would mostly be based on this interaction I just had with them as I think the toaster I have is average at best.

It’s always difficult with an appliance like this as you can’t test it out first. Toasters range from cheap $10 jobs to $250 or more, so you really don’t know whether you’ll like it until you get it home and actually use it. Reputation becomes quite important — we purchased a Fisher and Paykel washing machine purely based on the reputation and experience we’d had with all our other F&P appliances, including our previous 20-year-old washing machine. But I don’t think F&P make toasters 😉

After several visits from insurance company building assessors, structural engineers, etc. and after being refused our insurance claim for fixing the Bali hut that was damaged in the June storms (no, I’m NOT happy with CGU insurance as this was a Shire-approved structure yet the insurance company says it wasn’t designed properly in the first place!), we’re finally getting it repaired and secured permanently.

The repairs are going to cost us nearly as much as the original structure cost to build six years ago (according to the building info submitted to the Shire back then)…

Here are some ‘in progress’ photos:

The main work is to replace the short bolts holding the poles into the stirrups with REALLY BIG bolts (see the photo with my shoe in the picture), replace the steel frame with a stronger wood laminate roof frame and tie these beams to the rafters, and then add bracing from the poles to the wood laminate roof frame.