Hot and Windy October

The last few days have seen big fires in and around Hobart. On the eastern shore where we live, a fire burnt out about 800 hectares of bush land. On the western shore, around 30 hectares were burnt out, and there have also been lots of other fires around Tasmania and Australia as a whole. It all comes down to a very dry and hot time, both the winter we have just had and this spring. We get reports almost every day of the worst drought ever in Australia at the moment, and there are places where they have not had any rain for the last 7 years!

In 1967 there were some really bad fires around Hobart and just two days ago, the weather conditions were actually worse than in 1967. Winds of up to 80 - 90 km per hour, a humidity of around 8 % and temperatures up to 34 degrees. Luckily no lives or houses have been lost in the fires, but as mentioned, a lot of bush has burnt down.

For us there were never any real danger, partly as we only have grass around us - any fire here would be very swift and not very hot - but the smoke in the air passed our property and there were big delays for people travelling across the bridge out of Hobart. The paper today has an evening photo of Hobart where the fires in the hills create lots more light than the houses below. How John Howard can still be able to act the way he does when it comes to the whole issue of global warming is just amazing, seeing all the evidence around and the effect it is currently having in Australia.

Anyway, the only picture this time was taken of our thermometer showing the inside temperature on top and the outside temperature at the bottom. This is from our cabins which are not yet insulated with strawbales, thus we would hope that when it is all finished, the temperature difference between inside and outside should be bigger. During the two really hot and windy days Jodie went to the office to work, and Geir hid inside the garage working on the windows for the house. At least this way we got away from the wind!

The winds have naturally delayed our roofing work a bit. Luckily we had a reasonably quiet day where we got help from our friend Mike to put the colourbond sheets up on the roof. We then tied them all down and let them stay there during the two windy days. Yesterday morning it was quiet and Geir started putting up the sheets on one part of the roof, so we have about 20% of the work completed. We are now just hoping that we will get some quiet days this coming week so that we can finish the roofing work. Today is windy so there roof is a no-go area.

Finally, we have also now made a little summary of the cabin building as a little slide show. Again it has been posted on youtube, but you should be able to see it here:

OK, that would be it for today. See you next time.

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008