Heat and cataloguing

 

We have had a week of debilitating heat - over 40C most afternoons. Not pleasant at all.

I decided to let our lawn tough it out and only watered the plants in pots and those in a couple of beds that we had planted with heritage plants and paid real money for. This of course has encouraged the weeds, so I reckon, now the heat's broken, I'm going to have a relatively full dance card weeding for the next few days.

Still we managed quite well. 

Until yesterday, the power had stayed on, without even a blip.

However, yesterday the power blipped but came back in the morning, but the evening was a different story.

We had finished dinner, and being Saturday night, had settled down with an extra glass of wine to watch a show about property conservation at the English National Trust. Completely geeky, but I admit that I am hopelessly addicted to the show.

And then the power went out.

It was still hot - over 30C outside, so we swung into action, breaking out our LED storm lanterns, and basically following our plan for dealing with power outages.

We'd eaten, so that wasn't a problem. 

As is usually the case we had a couple of unhelpful canned messages from Ausnet, saying they'd detected a problem, so we broke out our emergency radio to listen to the news headlines at nine pm, to see if it was just the town or half the state.

Our local ABC station turned out to be broadcasting the women's tennis final from the Australian Open in Melbourne. Nine pm came and went and no local news or emergency updates, just grunts and thwacks from the tennis.

We decided that since they hadn't bothered interrupting the tennis, nothing serious had happened, and most likely it was damage to the power line feeding Beechworth - there are times when it seems we're connected to the grid by a piece of wet string.

So we sat and read for a bit before going to bed.

The power came back shortly before one in the morning, and unusually, the tv came back on and annoyed the cats who were peacefully sleeping on the sofa by showing some German language aga saga - the perils of watching SBS I suppose.

This morning it's a lot cooler and we've had some rain.

Unfortunately no more rain is forecast for the rest of the week, and the daytime temperatures look to be over 30C some days, but at least the temperatures round about dawn look to be cool enough to let me get an early morning bike ride in.

Last week it was too hot, even in the early morning, to get a bike ride in and basically I did very little but read. I did do a bit of blogging about bicycle infantry, and a bit of work chasing down Palmerston railway station on the old Bright Railway line. Unusually it turned out not to have a Wikipedia stub so I had a go at writing one.

I havn't written anything for Wikipedia for over twenty years, so needless to say the whole procedure was completely different from what I remembered, with a little bit more in the way of a formal review process, not to mention that the editing tools were very different, but I put something together based loosely on my blog post and submitted it for review.

I did manage a hot sweaty morning up at the Athenaeum cataloguing the books. No spectacular finds and I havn't got to the bottom of exactly what was the intent behind Indian and Colonial editions, but I'm making  progress with nearly ten percent of the collection catalogued, or more accurately what we think is ten percent, the last catalogue spreadsheet from sometime in the early 2000's has problems with duplications and missing entries, but I'm kind of assuming the duplications cancel out the missing entries...