Track Cyclone Hamish Progress on Twitter

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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

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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.

How to Install a Shade Cloth Sail Cover for a Patio

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Coolaroo Shade Cloth Sail attached to our House and Timber PostsThe Shade Cloth cover we picked up for at Bunnings for only $40! It is a 4 metre x 4 metre Coolaroo Shade Cloth Sail that comes with a 15-year warranty and offers 90% UV protection. It was discounted because it’s a non-standard colour, even though it matches our paint colour scheme almost perfectly.

First I sunk 150mm diameter posts 60cm into the ground and then filled it with cement for the outer posts. At the base of the posts I made sure that the concrete sloped down, so the water would run away and not pool against the posts. I then put I-bolts through the posts for my anchor points.

Coolaroo Shade Cloth Sail over our Outdoor Entertainment AreaAgainst the side of the house I found where the timber studs were and simply screwed the stainless steel eye plates through the siding and into the studs.

The shade cloth sail has stainless steal rings at the four corners, so once my anchor points were down I used turnbuckles to attache the shade cloth sail to the anchor points.

Shade Cloth Sail Anchor Points Turnbuckle and ibolt After attaching the shade cloth sail to the four anchor points I used the turnbuckles to tension everything so that it ended up with a nice even tension over the surface of the shade cloth sail.

All up the cover only cost about $240 including the posts, concrete, shade cloth and all the brackets.

Note: One of my posts ended up farther away than I had planned, so I used some chain link to extend the turnbuckle to the anchor point on the post.

New Photo of the Front of our Queenslander

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Tamara took this photo of the house back in November and I’ve been meaning to post it for a while as it’s a great photo of the front of the house with all the painting done and the window hoods on.

Front of our Raised Queenslander House

I love the perspective of the house from this photo. It turned out really good and it was a nice sunny day for it, we haven’t had many sunny days since then.

We have had 40 days and 40 nights of rain in a row here and there has been a lot of flooding around the region. It’s crazy, but I’m glad that we were at least spared getting hit by Tropical Cyclone Ellie a few days ago.

There is still a risk that the cyclone could reform as the tropical low crosses back over the ocean, but it’s a low risk.