willedoo

Latest BoM update only mentions marine wind warning, no land warnings apart from the flood warnings. Most of the future rain is expected later today and through tomorrow with some going through to mid week. Latest prediction for my area is possibly 200mm so a lot better than the 500mm possible forecast for some areas. This morning when they downgraded it to a low, the wind warning was down to 55kph steady and about 80kph gusts, but that's gone now. There was a lot of cyclones down here in the 1880's/1890's. My local town recorded 90" for the month of January in one of those years and ongoing rain cut the road to the coast for five months. Bearing in mind the old road would have been lower than the present one, just corderoy paper bark trees on the swamp with a gravel topcoat. The most rain I've had here was 33" in 24 hours in the 1992 flood.

Maybe building a storm bunker will have to be added to the jobs list. First cyclone down this way in 50 years but dodged a bullet where I am; not enough rain to wet the rain gauge and very little wind. The attached radar map was 1 to 2am this morning. Moreton and Stradbroke Islands acted as a buffer and knocked the pace off it. It's now a low off Bribie Island slowly headed this way. There's still up to 500mm of rain predicted but that will mostly be on the the more southern side of the low. Even though we didn't cop the wind here, it's still good to have made the preps. Everything is charged, water containers filled, food stocked, concrete block baffle barriers across the driveway and I bought a generator and a phone charger that plugs into the car. Gravity fed water and a gas stove helps. It started as a Cat 2 cyclone and one of the lady presenters on ABC radio made the joke that in NQ they don't even bother to take the washing off the clothesline for a Cat 2. 150kph gusts can still do some damage though. My little old shack is built to 43 metres/sec. wind rating, about 155kph, but I've built in extra bracing and tie down on top of that. One advantage I have is a 38 degree cathedral exposed beam ceiling with a plywood ceiling. The ply sheets are 3 metres long so completely cover the internal area without joins. To cut a long story short, I could lose the tin roof but the ply screwed to the rafters with battens over that would hold and would still repel water for a sustained period. My brother has a tile roof so if they blow off and the blue paper rips, the gyprock ceiling turns to porridge. The 38 degree roof pitch requires more wall bracing and less tie down than a lower pitch roof, but I doubled most of the triple-grip tie down anyway. Stump to bearer tie down is double requirements and there's a ton of cyclone rods and bracing ply panels. The biggest blow I've had here was probably about 60 knots and the shack didn't budge, so hopefully it would stand a cat 2 cyclone it's rated for. The last cyclone I experienced here was 1974 where it crossed just north of us. I was renting an old cane cutter's barracks right on the riverbank and it was shaking and rattling so much that I slept with the full face motorbike helmet on. It goes without saying I had that same helmet parked beside the bed last night just in case, or maybe just for good luck. In the '74 cyclone I woke up to knee deep water in the kitchen, waist deep at it's peak. Having breakfast, the water was just lapping the bottom of the table but didn't go too much higher. In a previous cyclone, that place had only six inches of the roof peak sticking out of the water.

Their commentary is good. I don't really like cricket but enjoy listening to the ABC commentary if that makes any sense.

No good asking me, I averaged 20% for maths. Maybe I did geometry but don't remember it. I did tech drawing in grade 10, would that incorporate geometry?

ABC radio is a fairly broad church. It's mostly the local ABC radio but on some holidays they tap into radio from other states while the local staff have a break. It's good to listen to as background while working. No ads, a lot of talkback and interaction with listeners, news breaks and a minimum of music. On weekends when those previously mentioned people I don't like listening to come on, I switch to ABC news radio. Parts of it are ok. When they run BBC segments some are good and others can get a bit too arty-farty for my liking. A few twits on there but mostly good. When I used to operate machinery I found the ABC radio relaxing to listen to while working. Commercial radio wasn't compatible in a machine.

That's possible. The small round stains on the timber floor that I've put down to gecko excretions, possibly urine, is whitish in colour.

The ABC radio has a lot of good points. For one, it's the only reliable source of emergency information on the air waves. A lot of the shows are good as well. The Country Hour just had it's 79th. birthday a couple of days ago. It's only downside is Macca and Roy and HG, but there's always ABC news radio to switch to while those clowns are on. Bad choice of words, clowns are a lot funnier. Macca has a huge cult following and the consequent ratings giving him a permanent spot. His show is not too bad when he goes on annual holidays and someone else takes over. That Trevor Chappell bloke (not the cricket player) did a good job filling in but watching drying paint is less boring than Macca. Another plus for sports lovers is Grandstand on the weekend. Not all NRL games are televised but they are covered on ABC radio. Plenty of cricket if that's your thing as well.

What first got me curious is that the noise was a more regular tap,tap,tap type of sound as opposed to a rat chewing sound. I finally tracked them down on the fly screen making the noise while bashing a beetle. Another thing that had me fooled for a while was what I thought to be mouse poo turned out to be gecko poo. The gecko poo is very similar in size and colour to the mouse poo but has a small white tail on the end of it. My geckos don't poo much but when they are on the ceiling they excrete something, maybe gecko pee. Whatever it is, it leaves round whitish blotches on the timber floor. It bonds to the floor quite well and takes a bit of work with the mop to get it off.

Some observation of the dubious dtellas solved another mystery. What I often think is a rat making a noise is actually the dubious critters bashing an insect about. They get a bug in their mouth and bash it against something the same way a kookaburra does to break their food into smaller pieces.

I've had geckos living in the house almost since I built it in 1996. They live around 7 years so this lot would be the fourth generation living here. Someone told me the house geckos are the introduced Asian gecko, but I was always a bit dubious about that. A couple of nights ago I decided to google geckos and it turns out mine are dubious after all - they are natives called dubious dtella. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubious_dtella

I see the increasing power of local government as a problem. I don't know how councils are in other states but Queensland local government authorities have considerably more autonomy than those in other states. As a consequence they've become almost a law under their own. Bylaws and restrictions on local residents are increasing all the time and some councils like those in my region have set ridiculous fee structures for any sort of building or renovation work. The amount of money they are asking now is akin to paying bribes to the mafia. Councils here now have full time staff who's sole job is to surveil residents via satellite images so they can bust them for daring to put up a chook house on a rural block and bleed as much money in compliance and application fees as they can. It's not only the average bloke that's affected, but it's having a big effect on builders with increasing fees and red tape. Just as an example, friends of mine live on a rural block of about 40 acres quite a way out of town. They recently got caught by the council as over some time they'd put up a small shed and built a small deck of a few square metres off an existing shed. Councils here no longer do building inspections; that now all has to be certified by private engineers. All up, without any extra building work needed, just in council fees and engineers fees, it cost them over $20,000. The application fee for the small, roofless deck of a few square metres was over $800. They also had a couple of shipping containers that contain water tanks for some fish breeding they do. Council made them hire an engineer to certify the shipping containers. I can understand it in town, but going after all the rural residents like that is a bit Big Brother for my liking. The friends mentioned above also built a second dwelling last year, all legal and put through council. Their son and family now live in the original house and they are in the second dwelling. Town planning allows for a granny flat with restrictions on size and distance away from the main house. They didn't want to live in a pokey little granny flat close to their son and family, so they approached the council and were told they could apply for a relaxation of town planning rules. So in other words, they paid council a lot of money so they could do what the town plan says you can't do, and now have a three bedroom house to live in. It's just legalised bribery. If you think I'm exaggerating, just talk to any builders in this district. Most builders will tell you straight out that dealing with the council is like dealing with a bunch of crooks. Councils are certainly contributing to the housing shortage. They don't care about housing availability or affordability, just how much money they can skim off people. Technically they come under the control of the state government via the local government act, but the state over time has given them too much autonomy. We've just had a change of state government, so it will be interesting to see if the new government will do anything about the councils. I'm not holding my breath. In other states the state government has more control over councils so there's more consistency between regulations of different councils. Here they just make up their own rules and screw over the residents and ratepayers as well as the building industry as they see fit. Local government is the weak link in our three tiers of government in this country. They're very counter-productive.

I saw Komodo Dragons in the Yogyakarta zoo and was surprised at how big they were. They were like a crocodile with a dinosaur head. When you see them up close it's not surprising they can kill and eat people.

I hope nobody had baked beans for breakfast.

Marty, I've noticed news.com.au has undergone quite a big change lately. Once it was probably one of the more readable Murdoch outlets but lately they seem to have adopted a different business model and are mainly running clickbait headlines with trashy tabloid style articles. I like them for the comedy appeal. I click on the clickbait just for the fun of seeing the real story. As a made up example, the sort of thing they do is run a headline like " Star reveals sad news". Click on the article and it will be some barely known soap opera actor revealing his mother in law has to get a wisdom tooth removed. Stuff like that and trying to invent royal family scandal. Once they were more interested in news but money making clickbait now rules. Perhaps they've had editorial change or following directives of parent companies to make more money.

ome, my apologies for an incorrect apostrophe in 'lots'. Force of habit.

It seems like a lot of presidential pardons are given as the president is preparing to leave office. I'm only speculating here but Biden probably gave those past statements about not pardoning his son because he feared the political fallout if he stated that intention with an election looming. Now that the Democrat ship has hit the rocks, any political fallout from changing his stance will be only temporary and not an election issue as it would have been previously. So it looks like he's gone to Plan B as there's very little to lose politically and lot's to gain for him and his family.

Good advice, I'll do that. And thanks for sticking to the subject and not making a comparison with Trump. That's one Trump free argument; we're doing well.

As predicted. It seems impossible on this forum to debate any critisism of Biden without responses of what about Trump as an argument. ok, I get it, what about Trump? There's other threads about Trump. The issue was about Biden's record, not Trump's. Here's a challenge, let's see if we can get through another page or two on this topic without the cracked record of what about Trump rearing it's head. I have my doubts, but let's see.

I've found since retiring that no job's as urgent as it once was when you had to get it finished on the weekend because you had to be at work on Monday. Now life is just one big weekend.

It should be, but doesn't apply to politicians apparently. Joe's word doesn't seem to mean much otherwise he would have stuck to what he's said on several occasions and not pardoned his son.

The act of pardoning his son shouldn't have to be comparable. It can be viewed on it's own from the point of view of Biden's own integrity. His son was charged with firearm offences and tax evasion. He pleaded guilty and was convicted. Biden repeatedly said he wouldn't pardon him. Biden has now pardoned him. That's the issue. He's put his son above the law after saying he wouldn't. Forget about what Trump's done or someone did to Clinton for a minute. This is what Biden's done. We have to remember they are politicians. Biden might have been genuine at the time he said he wouldn't pardon his son for ethical reasons. Or he might have held that position as he intended running for another term and thought it would be politically damaging to pardon him. Only he and his advisors would know the answer to that. Now that he's retiring he's got nothing to lose, so it looks like he's swapping reputation for his son's benefit. That's understandable but still doesn't make it right.

With the roundabouts with traffic lights, the lights are only in use at peak traffic times. The rest of the time the roundabout functions as normal.

Where I live the traffic is getting to the stage where they're putting traffic lights at roundabouts or getting rid of them and installing normal traffic light intersections. It's only happening on the really bad roundabouts, there's thousands of small ones that still work ok.

What's Clinton got to do with Hunter Biden's guilt or innocence. I'm presuming guilt as he pleaded guilty. If he was innocent and pleaded guilty, that would be a bit unusual.

If that's case it's the U.S. Department of Justice that are the crooks. If it was all BS to get at Biden, why did Hunter plead guilty? https://www.justice.gov/sco-weiss/pr/robert-hunter-biden-convicted-three-felony-tax-offenses-and-six-misdemeanor-tax-offenses