Posted in travel on 10/22/2004 02:04 pm by Tam
It’s 28 degrees here. Twenty-eight !! That’s, like, 82. And sunny, and gorgeous. Yay !
Melbourne’s nice. I went into the city yesterday after class and…
…ate fried cheese and a salad in the Greek Quarter
…wandered through Chinatown (not as comprehensive as some, and very narrow, but it didn’t smell fishy the way they usually do, so that’s nice
…listened to/watched a crazy Dutch woman in a funky coat make a bunch of people laugh. No, really, she was demonstrating different kinds of laughs, and having the audience do them with her. They’re having an Arts Festival here.
…ate chili chocolate ice cream on a promenade along the Yarra River. The ice cream tasted like chocolate, but made my uvula sting (I’ve been coughing, on account of having some kind of cold). The Southbank Promenade is what Queen’s Wharf really ought to be, and what I think they must have been going for with Darling Harbour, only they went overboard and turned it into some hideous yuppie zombie thing.
Today, I took the tram in the other direction and found the Funky part of town (yay !). Lots of shiny things I’d have bought right up back in my Disposable Income days. Must decide what to eat tonight…
…and what the heck to do about arriving in Auckland at 2am on Saturday. :^P
Posted in farming on 10/22/2004 10:01 am by Stephen
Yesterday I had a little adventure. While Clare and Smitty were off exploring Wellington, I decided to burn off some of the cut brush (gorse) on the back hill. The day was still and sunny, perfect weather for pyromania. I burned off a few piles on the lower part of the hill, then moved up to the big patch in the middle. I cleared a space around one pile of dead dry gorse, and lit a match.
For the first minute everything was good, then sudddenly the wind gusted up from “near-dead-calm” to “quite-perky”. The fire jumped the gap into the other cut brush on the hill. I tried to contain the fire by flinging burning branches for all of 20 or 30 seconds, but the wind was continuing to gust in various directions… and I realized I was standing in a huge field of knee-deep tinder-dry brush.
I ran.
I don’t think I uttered any explitives as I ran. I think I might have muttered “hot, hot, hot!” as I could feel the radient heat through my many (thankfully non-flammable) layers as a wall of fire raced along behind me. I made it to a place downhill and upwind and thus relatively safe. From this vantage point I watched the fire go. Some piles burned, some didn’t as the erratic wind kept changing direction. Flames were 20+ feet tall in places. Very exciting. If anyone was going to call 111, that was the time. (I had informed fire control I was planning a burn, this was not what I had in mind!) Nobody did.
I found out today that Yvonne was standing below in the paddocks, having come to work with one of her horses, watching the conflagration. It was apparently as impressive from a distance as it was up close. She could see me scurrying around amongst the flames.
Once the wind abated to only-occasional gusts I went around and extinguised the outer edges of the expanding burn (by extinguish read “beat the fire out with a stick”). After 20 or 30 minutes everything was back under control, though convincing my heart rate to come back down to 3-digits was a bit more of a challenge!
At least in this circumstance the “worst-case” for an out-of-control fire was not so bad. It would have burned 50-meters through the live gorse until it hit the neighbors boundry fence. From there there is only short and green grass, so it would have stopped. Erratic weather can make life so much mroe interesting.