Overrun by Maintenance Problems!

Broken HammerSince moving into our house here in Adelaide in December 2012 we have been overwelmed by the amount of maintenance that we have needed to do on the house. The more I look around the place and live here, the more I am convinced that the previous owners never did anything to maintain the house.

I’m not just talking about big jobs, but even small things like replacing the batteries in the smoke detectors and cleaning the filter in the range hood. I even found two dead mice in the range hood that had pretty much mummified! That really had me wondering how long it had been since they cleaned it out.

Some day I hope that we finally get on top of all the maintenance jobs on the house so that maybe we can move on to making improvements on the place and personalized it to make it our own. Right now however, after 1.5 years in the house, I feel like we are still just trying to bring the place up a level that will give us a canvas to work with.

photo credit: hanaloftus via photopin cc

Track Cyclone Hamish Progress on Twitter

Tropical Cylcone Hamish Off the North Queensland Coast Cyclone Hamish has now been upgraded to a category 3 cyclone and is still tracking down the coast of Queensland. At the moment they are predicting that it will stay off the coast, but since cyclones are rather unpredictable we will have to prepare for the worst. It is set to be off the coast of Townsville about this time tomorrow.

An interesting way to follow and track Tropical Cyclone Hamish is using a service called Twitter.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to post short, 140 character posts to it’s service. One of the features that is has is to set topics to the short posts, which people up and down the Queensland Coast are starting to do with Tropical Cyclone Hamish.

You can follow people’s posts about cyclone Hamish on Twitter here.

If you are experiencing anything to do with the cyclone and want to post about it, just sign up on Twitter and include “#hamish” in your post to add to the topic.

Since it’s after mid-night right now in Queensland you can expect things to be quiet on that topic over night, but it will no doubt pick up again in the morning.

Tropical Cyclone Hamish Forms off the Coast

I was really hoping that Tropical Cyclone Ellie was going to be our only tropical cyclone this year. I know that was unrealistic to hope for, but I was hoping …

Last night Tropical Cyclone Hamish formed off the North Queensland Coast about 200km North of Cairns. If you have a look at the tracking map below, you will see that Cyclone Hamish is expected to be a category 3 cyclone by tonight, and is expected to track down the coast of Queensland over the weekend.

Tropical Cylcone Hamish Forms Off North Queensland Coast

Tropical Cylcone Hamish is expected to be off the coast of Townsville by Sunday, but at the moment they are not expecting it to make landfall.

A category 3 cyclone can be a scary cyclone. Cyclone Larry, which brought massive destruction to Innisfail in 2006, was a Category 4 cyclone, which Hamish will be not too far off of.

The best that we can hope for is that Hamish will continue to track down the coast, and then turn out to sea, slowly loose strength and die. There is currently a tropical cyclone warning issued for between Cape Melville and Cardwell, and a cyclone watch between Cardwell and Mackay, which includes us here in Townsville.

About this time last year we had some wild weather and I was asked by some passers by if I wanted a cyclone, to which I answer a definite “NO!”. Upon hearing that they called me a “pansy” for not wanting a cyclone to hit.

Well, if that’s the case, then today I am again a pansy.

Tropical Cyclone Hamish, please stay off the coast …

You can track the latest updates on Tropical Cyclone Hamish on the Australia Bureau of Meteorology web-site here.

Tropical Cyclone Ellie to hit North of Townsville

It’s time to batten down the hatches so to speak as Tropical Cyclone Ellie is due to hit land about 120km North of Townsville on Monday (tomorrow) at around noon. Here is the current tracking map from the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (link):

Tropical Cylcone Ellie North of Townsville

We will be keeping a close eye on this cyclone and this afternoon I’ll be taking down the shade cloth cover from our outdoor entertainment area. If the cyclone starts to build in strength, or move south at all, I’ll also be taking in the chairs, table and possibly the barbeque into the garage.

The last cyclone to hit near Townsville was Tropical Cyclone Larry in 1996 while our house was being lifted. That cyclone destroyed or damaged 1 of 3 houses in Innisfail, which you can see on the map above. This time we should see an increase in rain and strong winds in Townsville, but if it continues on the current path we should be fairly safe here.

Dealing with cyclones is one of the challenges we get to deal with living in the tropics. My wife’s been talking about writing an article about how challenging this climate can be at times (this week we had to throw out a backpack and at least one pair of shoes because of mould). Not sure if she will get around to it, but if so I’ll make sure to post it on here …