Ah, plumbing!

 Four years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, when everything was locked down, our hot water service broke.

We had planned on a greener replacement, but in the middle of the pandemic, we ended up with a like for like replacement.

And it's been fine, delivering hot water when we want it.

Now, like many Australian houses we have tempered water in the bathrooms - basically cold water is blended automagically with the hot to ensure that you can never accidentally scald yourself in the bath, or at least not as badly if you used water straight from the hot water tank, which sits somewhere between 65 and 70C.

Our kitchen and laundry/utility area both get proper hot water direct from the tank - when we had the kitchen renovated the plumber doing the work asked us if we wanted 'proper' hot water or tempered water in the kitchen. 

Not really understanding what tempered water was we went for 'proper' hot water, especially as we don't have young children around.

The automagical blending is done via a tempering valve, which at its simplest consists of a bimetallic strip opening and closing the hot water line as required

This is a picture of our old one, and probably about twenty five years old.

At some point in the last few months, ours must have ceased to do its magic and stuck part way open.

We don't know when it failed, as over summer our cold water is never really cold, more tepid or cool, and the valve must have been letting in enough hot water that we still seemed to be able to have hot showers in the morning.

Well, over the last few days it's turned to a classic Alpine autumn, clear sunny days and cold starlit nights and our cold water has turned properly cold again.

Unfortunately so did our shower, which went from acceptably warm to lukewarm.

At first I thought that the thermostat on the hot water system must have gone.

So I called a local electrician who came and tested it - no it was working fine, as was the heating element. However he flipped the tank bleed valve and was rewarded with a jet of 70C water.

So it wasn't the hot water system. He guessed it might be the tempering valve and suggested that I call a plumber.

Swapping the valve solved the problem, hot showers all round. The plumber also showed me how to adjust the degree of mixing and hence the temperature of the tempered water - incredibly simple if you know how, you just need the right tool, a little triangular valve key.

So, lesson learned. It isn't always the hot water thermostat. 

If the hot water in the kitchen sink is noticeably hotter than the shower, you probably have one of these automagical valves on the bathroom supply, and if it goes wrong, as ours did, you should find that the sink hot water should stay hot while the shower gets progressively cooler ...

Another Covid shot

 These days, I qualify as an 'Older Australian', which for now means that I get a free Covid booster shot every six months or so, just as I get a free flu shot at the start of winter.

Our local pharmacy hasn't yet got stock of the government approved flu vaccine for us oldies which meant that yesterday it was simply a Covid booster.

During the pandemic I used to get quite an unpleasant reaction to both Astra Zeneca and Pfizer, but last time I had a Pfizer booster and it wasn't too bad.

This time they were giving out the latest Moderna vaccine that has been rated by  the TGA as particularly effective against the latest Omicron strains.

As I hadn't had Moderna before I was expecting the usual side effects, but no, they were pretty mild - the worst was what we'll politely describe as 'copious urination' or less politely 'having to get up a couple of times at night and pee like a horse'.

I certainly needed my usual two mugs of tea before breakfast, but otherwise I'm fine - perhaps a slight headache, but the the fire people have been back burning and it's a cold morning (snow forecast down to 1300m), cold enough for people to light their wood stoves, so there's some smoke in the air, so I wouldn't ascribe my sinusy feeling this morning to my Covid shot yesterday.

Changing the clock

 Today's Clock Change day, the day when the south east of Australia finally acknowledges the imminent onset of winter and puts the clock back an hour.

The cats, of course, were merely puzzled as to why the humans were still in bed and bounded in to demand breakfast and to be let out because, hey, the sun was up, even though officially it was not quite six thirty in the morning.

There will doubtless be more feline grumpiness later today when they find dinner's going to be later than usual, but they'll adjust.

In the old days, when I still had family overseas, clock change day was important as suddenly we went from being eleven hours ahead of the UK to nine hours - at one time for some weird reason Canberra used to go forward when Europe went back and vice versa, which was a bit silly - by the last weekend in October we were well into spring, and the last weekend in March was a little too early.

Nowadays we change on first weekend in October and the first weekend in April.

The one advantage of following Europe was we didn't have a few weeks in October and a week around Easter when the time difference was ten hours - scheduling calls is definitely easier when the difference is only nine hours rather than eleven.

In the old days, and I'm talking thirty or forty years ago, when there was no internet wide time synchronisation and time servers needed to be reset and reconfigured by hand clock change day was always a bit stressful as inevitably there would be one server in an inaccessible cupboard somewhere that hadn't picked up the update.

However that's all in the past - we're down to the oven, the microwave and the big pretend railway station clock in the loungeroom needing to be changed manually - since we replaced all the other clocks with either Lenovo smart clocks or Google smart displays everything else just does it automagically ...

Tasmanian election fun (we should get out more)

While we were in Tasmania, they were having an election.

That is of course their business but for us it was a source of amusement, from counting the number of rural candidates with hats - a sort of ‘I spy with my little eye’ on long drives across the hinterland, and of course double points if it was someone we hadn’t seen before, to looking out for candidates with implausible names.

This game was a bit of a failure, the only candidate with a vaguely amusing name was the Greens' Tabatha Badger, whose name irresistibly reminded us of the mythical Gerald Tree-Frogg, a character in a BBC late night satire show who once appeared in a moth eaten baggy gardening jumper claiming to be the Greens’ defence spokesperson and suggesting that they would scrap the defence forces and replace them with a very large hedge. 

(I’m sure that Ms Badger is in reality a serious politician, and has no plans regarding the deployment of hedges, large or small.)

There was also a minor scandal caused by a satirical video by Juice Media that the Liberals claimed was defamatory - if you’re interested you can watch it via the Guardian’s website, which given the complete lunacy of some of Tasmanian politics is not as detached from reality as you might think.

For example, the Liberals proposed helping fund a chocolate fountain and promoted as job creation program that would encourage tourists to visit - like, you’re giving money to a multinational to build a chocolate fountain  ...

Anyway we don’t live there, so we’ll move on ...

The end of the growing season

 The days are getting shorter and the nights are growing colder, so here on the edge of the Australian Alps Easter usually marks the end of the growing season.

This year's not been the best, dry then cold and wet in spring. 

We did get some decent broad beans and early potatoes, but the capsicums and chillis were a total failure this year and both the tomatoes and zucchini nearly so.

After the possums, who've never been much of a problem in previous years, destroyed my zucchini and tomato plants several times over I resorted to rearing them in cages.

The zucchini were really started too late and didn't do much more than produce a lot of leaf, but the tomatoes finally came sort of ok while we were away in Tasmania. 

In normal years we usually have an embarrassingly large crop and it doesn't matter if the local wildlife steal a few, but this year it was a race with the pouched demons as to who got there first.

There are still a few green tomatoes left, but the plants are beginning to visibly die off, so I suspect that next week's threatened few days of cold and wet will kill them off.

We still have a couple of smallish Japanese kobacha pumpkins that are still growing. I'd expect to harvest them towards the end of April about the time of the local pumpkin festival, and that will be that for 2024's growing season.

Still, I'll be planting my broad beans in May and hoping for a better growing year in 2024-5 ....

[Update 30/03/2024]

Conversations with other gardeners suggest its not just me - other people have had problems with possums and zucchini and tomatoes not cropping.

The local possum population is obviously hungry - some have even resorted to trying (and rejecting) windfall lemons. 

At the same time it wasn't the zucchini plants not flowering, it was the lack of a crop, suggesting a lack of pollinating insects, and that is worrying...

Another wart gone

 I was standing under the shower one January morning when I noticed a small black lump on my chest that didn't use to be there.

So I did the sensible thing and phoned the local health centre to make an appointment. Of course it takes forever to get a GP appointment these days so I had to wait about four weeks. Not ideal, but that's how things are.

Now I've been there before with nasty looking warts, so I was reasonably relaxed about it. More so than my GP, who was quite worried about it and even took a photograph to explain why.

Anyway, the upshot was that the Thursday before we left for Tasmania, I had it cut out. My new GP prefers Louis Armstrong to rugby, so I lay on my back while he worked away and listened to Louie from my GP's spotify account.

I'd talked to him about my going to Tasmania, and suggested using dissolving stitches. He was at first reluctant - apparently there's a higher risk of infection with dissolving stitches - but once he realised the impossibility of my getting to any health centre in Tasmania to get my stitches out we settled for dissolving stitches, a follow up phone call and a script for antibiotics in case the wound started misbehaving, plus my promising to come in to the health centre once I was back to have the nurse look at it to double check it was okay.

Well, when the results came back from pathology it wasn't a nasty malignant wart, just a nasty wart I was probably better off without.

The wound healed nicely, the only problem was that my backpack strap tended to catch the wound so I kept a dressing on it for longer than strictly necessary to protect it.

Obviously, I cleaned, checked and disinfected the area when I changed the dressing and had absolutely zero problems except for some mild irritation from the dressing adhesive - obviously the hypoallergenic dressings weren't quite hypo enough for prolonged use.

This morning I went to the health centre, and spent longer explaining the history to the nurse than she spent checking the wound - everything was fine and as it should be.

And I must say, despite all the problems and under resourcing of rural health care not only did they do a very good job, they listened to me and were prepared to do something a little out of the usual to fit in with my commitments ...

Making pesto at home

 Despite it being a poor summer for our zucchini and parsley (the jury's out on the tomatoes - the crop looks good but is sitting in a green glower at the moment) we have a zonkingly large crop of basil - more than we can eat, so last night we had pasta, peas and baby potatoes with home made pesto.

Pine nuts are almost unobtainable at the moment - I would guess sanctions as a lot are harvested in Siberia - so we did a little detective work as to alternatives.

Most commercial jar pestos use cashews as a substitute, but we thought we'd try something different.

We found a recipe at the University of Utrecht that looked good and used sunflower seeds as a more environmentally friendly substitute.

The only problem was that we were out of sunflower seeds. We used almonds, dry roasted in a pan and fed through the spice grinder as a substitute. Almonds are grown locally but are wasteful of water, something to consider when one lives on the driest inhabited continent on the planet. Walnuts - also grown locally - or macadamia nuts  would have been a better choice, and certainly something to experiment with next time.

Anyway, we followed the bouncing ball and put it together, and it was really good. Certainly we'd do it again, and for making fresh pesto out of season Utrecht suggests carrot greens as a substitute - maybe we'll try that as well, with macadamia nuts ....