Bike ride this morning

 And this morning I finally got a bike ride after the heatwave hiatus.

Nothing special, just my usual route down Bridge Road to Mellish street, and then along the bike path to Alma Road as far as Kibell Lane and then doubling back via Balaclava Road and home..

It was a bit warmer than yesterday, just over 10C when I set out a little before sunrise (the first time this year I've had to use lights on my bike).

Pleasant ride with a large pale almost full moon in the purplish dawn light - strange to think we're almost half way to the equinox already...

Socks and hoodie

 

a pair of Roman socks from Egypt - David Jackson, CC BY-SA 2.0 UK vis Wikimedia commons

Last week we had a run of 40C plus days.

Today, I'm sitting typing this wearing socks and a hoodie (and pants, I hasten to add), and we have the heating on - it was a tropical 7C this morning when we woke up, and the cats have remained welded to the sofa all morning, refusing to put a paw outside...

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...

Guerilla cataloguing (part 93)

 Well, the guerilla cataloguing exercise is continuing to bear fruit.

I think I now have an understanding of the shoestring nature of the Athenaeum's library with books bought second hand from larger circulating libraries in the 1920's and 1930's

and earlier in the nineteenth century from Mullen's and from as yet unidentified importers of second hand books from the UK.

Likewise I think I now have a handle on that 1920's phenomenon, the hygenic library, 

And, working with the collection, one can start to see how the Australian publishing and printing industry developed from the 1880's onwards with locally produced reprints of books printed in England, sometimes under the British publisher's name, or sometimes by an Australian publisher in agreement with the original UK publisher.

The one thing I havn't quite got my head around yet are Imperial and Colonial editions. Often produced by UK publishers, and printed in England, they usually have a statement on the flyleaf something like 'This book is only for sale in India and the Colonies and must not be imported or sold in the United Kingdom'.

The wording varies from publisher to publisher, but the intent is clear - these editions were not for domestic (ie UK) use.

At first I thought they might have been printed cheaply in India, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The books often seem to be produced using materials of similar quality to those of the UK editions, and are often printed in England. 

My current hypothesis is that they are editions of books published in the UK a few years earlier, which are being reprinted and sold in a cheaper edition, but to be honest, I don't really have enough evidence as yet.

So, I guess from here on in, the fiction collection will be more of the same, triple decker suspense novels and yellow backs from the Victorian era, murder mysteries and westerns from the 1920s and 30s, with the westerns being mostly replaced by romance and spy novels in the 1950s.

This isn't hard and fast - for example this morning I catalogued a Mills and Boon novel from the 1920s - but it is true that the classic murder mystery novels and western novels seem to appear after world war one, and it's not true to say that this is a reflection of growing American influence - most of the murder mysteries are English, and quite a few of the Western type novels are set in Canada, though I suspect the rise of silent movies might be behind the increasing popularity of Western novels.

But life is not all about cataloguing - I managed to get better network performance out of my old AMD Ryzen based machine by adding a wireless repeater into the equation, as well as spending my pocket money not on sweets, but on a refurbished Microsoft Surface in my quest to find an ideal lightweight machine to carry about.

Really what I'm trying to do, I realise, is to come up with something that had the performance of my old and now deceased 2012 Macbook Air, but which runs either Linux (preferably) or Windows.

I've come close, but I've never quite hit the sweet spot ...

(oh, and I did a blog post to mark the 125th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria)

A wireless repeater

 My old AMD based laptop, the one I tried Bunsen Labs on, due to some quirk doesn't have terribly good network connectivity on my bench in the outside studio. Basically wifi is slow - and it's the machine, the old Ubuntu based iMac next to it manages a 40Mbit/s connection - good enough for web browsing and file uploads.

So I started hatching plans to improve performance, the more intricate one involving a pair of old powerline adapters and an old wifi access point.

However before I got round to hooking them up I remembered that I had an old Vonets unit somewhere that can be configured as a wireless repeater

USB powered and about half the size of a mobile phone, deploying it seemed a lot easier than playing games of hitech Lego with powerline adapters.

Installing it seems to have solved the problem

speed is not lightning (10Mbit/s ±2), but good enough for the basics, be it web browsing, email, or file uploads and downloads, after all in the late 1990s, a 10Mbit/s network was something special, and the university I worked at at the time had an amazing 2Mbit/s connection to the internet!

Normal service has resumed

 Well, we seem to have escaped the bushfires for now.

While I blithely tell people that the town hasn't burned since European settlement at the start of the gold rush, we are surrounded by pine forest and historic park reserves, and I'm well aware that one spark could start a serious incident.

As it was there were no grassfires or bushfires locally, and none of the fires in the hills came close, unlike in 2020.

Our major problem was smoke, and we found ourselves running the air purifier every day until Thursday evening when a storm brought a decent dump of rain. Fortunately the lightning didn't start a fire anywhere, or if it did, the rain was heavy enough to put it out.

As always we're well aware that we got off lightly compared to those affected by the Harcourt, Longwood and Walwa fires and our thoughts are with them.

Otherwise, now that the smoke has cleared, it's back to normal. The freeway south reopened a few days ago and the trains are running again.

We went over to Bright on the last day of smoke to have a look at the Bright Art show. J has some paintings in the show and as always we were curious to see how they have been hung, and to see what has sold.

Strangely, not a lot seemed to have been sold, perhaps because there was not a lot of 'fireplace art' in the show - large paintings to go on the chimney breast in your restored cottage or 1900's villa.

On the way back we stopped at the Moroccan themed cafe in Myrtleford for lunch and had a look at the attached architectural salvage and tile shop. 

We didn't buy anything, but we did find that they had a selection of little 20mm x20mm mosaic tiles as well as some clipped bits - ideal for our planned hall table restoration.

Otherwise, it's been much as before. No early morning bike rides because of the smoke, and I did feel my chest getting quite tight after I walked back after dropping off my (very) old green Subaru for a oil change and safety check. (Old enough that the garage asked if I was thinking of getting heritage plates for it.)

However, by Friday the air was clear again and we were back to normal when I drove up to Stanley for a bit of cataloguing at the Athenaeum. The project's going well, even if we're over the initial discovery phase of finding that they had been buying second hand books both from Mullen's in Melbourne, and an as yet unknown importer of second hand books from England.

It's also quite clear that during and immediately after the second world war a lot of British publishers were having separate Australian editions of books printed locally - something similar to what I found when documenting Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust - during the second world war when Australia was cut off from the UK, the traditional source of imported items, there was a lot of import substitution with local equivalent products being manufactured.

Besides this, not much, the smoke stopped any gardening so I've been reading Richard Holmes' Tommy, ostensibly a history of the ordinary British soldier's experience of the western front, but which actually has a marked bias towards officers drawn from the middle and upper classes, perhaps simply because they were simply more likely to leave material behind in the form of diaries and letters that the ordinary conscript.

And I also found time to blog about an Albanian 1 Lek coin I've acquired as part of my collection of ephemera connected with World War One and its aftermath ...

And today we have smoke...

 

Not surprisingly, after the fires, we have smoke, serious smoke haze this morning, bad enough that for the first time since the Black Summer fires, we're running the air purifier we bought back then. 

For the last six years it has sat in the lounge room taking up space. We never felt the need to run it during Covid, and while we've almost turned it on a couple of times when the Fire Management people have being doing back burning to reduce the fuel load in the Gorge and the old gold diggings, it's never been quite that bad.

Today's different.

All plans for bike rides, a swim in the lake and what have you are off. Currently showers are forecast for mid week - hopefully they will damp down the fire areas and clear the air a bit ...