Rain spotting, a national pastime.

The Nylex 600 Rainmaster. Oh it’s a beast of a machine. Zero to twenty five in …well… as long as it takes. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes over a month and on scary occasions, well over several months. The numbers are millimeters you see, millimeters of rain, something that was once called inches of rain.

The proof that middle aged insanity has developed is that I was excited to be given a rain gauge for Christmas. Well it beats underpants and socks!

“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure,”  states Alice Hoffman in her book Here on Earth.

The Nylex 600 Rainmaster is designed to add some surety to the weather. Science is purely the act of taking measurements and using the numbers to understand what is happening and predict what future numbers could be. The Nylex 600 Rainmaster is just the ticket to help me make the measurements of rainfall and provide a clearer pattern of what the weather might bring.

I am not alone in my endeavours. Where I live, everyone in the region, everybody in the town has a rain gauge of some sort. There are always the official Government weather centres with their fancy Stephenson screens and their white coated automatons checking their fancy instruments to report at designated times in a coordinated regime to provide a national media weather report. However as anyone can tell you, when they say it is a hot twenty eight in the city, you are sweating your skin off in what appears to be the back draft from the engines of a Boeing 747 on take off. The data they provide is too broad, not specific enough for your own situation.

The national news says it will be raining in Sydney with a temperature of 25 degrees C ( 77degs F), a fine day for Brisbane and a warm 30 degrees C ( 86 degs F), but what about in between? It is a bloody days drive between the two cities, we have weather too you know!

“Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.”  Kim Hubbard

Everybody talks about the weather but here in Australia the main topic is usually rain and or the heat. The rain is quite specific if there has been any.

 “We got 19 last night!”

“Gee we only had 11”

“ Seriously?  It was 34 out our way”

It is back to the millimeters thingee again and it is a serious business, every millimetre counts. Every millimeter counts because every body is counting. Having a rain gauge at home is like having a mailbox or a front door.

If it rains heavily you want to know how heavily. Was it as much as the 256.5 millimetres we had in 24 hours on the 29^th of January 2013? In three days we had 515mm’s of rain. That is 20.3 inches of rain! That had me scrambling to build an ark! With that amount of water falling you know you are going to have serious issues getting about if getting about is even possible.

With a rain gauge you can assess how different your own particular weather is from anyone elses, you can see year to year trends, you can analyse whether the changes to the weather are going in a particular direction or are cyclic.

With a rain gauge you can plan.  Your can plan your holidays, plan a special event or party,  plan your garden planting, plan your water restrictions to cope with the dry months ( the only water that supplies our house comes from what we collect from the roof and store in a tank).

As virtually everyone, at least in regional and rural Australia, has a rain gauge, you can see at almost a micro level what your climate actually is. It is liberating. Knowledge is power.

So yes, the  Nylex 600 Rainmaster is a well utilized feature of our property and it is a beast of a machine.  

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, with the least amount of water in rivers, the lowest run-off and the smallest area of permanent wetlands of all the continents.

One third of the continent produces almost no run-off at all and Australia’s rainfall and stream-flow are the most variable in the world.

Australian Government fact sheet.

Sunday drive to the tip.

It was impossible to find an accurate figure as to how many households in Australia do not have a waste collection service. Given we live within  40kms of a major regional centre and are one of the no collection households, there must be quite a few. The kerbside service that extends up this way ends when the asphalt roads turn to gravel. We cannot have dirty rubbish trucks now can we?

It is imperative we clear our waste materials. Luckily we have a refuse transfer centre about 10kms away. However, with a load of stinking household scraps and waste, brewed in the heat of summer, infested with fly maggots, the journey is not for the faint hearted.

I have given up trying to squeeze the smelly trash into the car, the smell is unbearable so I hoist this onto the roof of the car. I usually do this every two weeks. My journey has to coincide with when I am not working (I am a shift worker), and  one of the three days a week when the transfer centre is open.

The volume of municipal waste generated per person in Australia (606kg) is more than that generated in Canada (411kg), Germany (555kg), and England (574kg). However, Australia generates less municipal waste per person than the United States (927kg). Souce Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006/7

We recycle nearly every thing we can. Therefore the greatest volume of material going to the refuse transfer station or what us Australians call the tip is made up of recyclable material.

The recyclables are jammed into the car.

All green waste we generate including weeds, tree branches, some paper, is composted or used as mulch.  The tip does have an area for green waste but we have enough space to not need it. Plus all organic matter we can return to the earth is vital to improve the quality of our acidic clay soil.

The refuse transfer centre in all its glory. The yellow bin is for recyclables, the area on the left is for waste metals and tyres. The green building houses a large open container for general waste.A truck comes from the regional city centre every week to replace the bins with fresh ones and remove the full bins.

The green waste section. This is tilled into a mulch which is free to remove. However we do not use it anymore as it was full of weed seed.  

Putting the rubbish out is a relatively time consuming household chore but there is one main benefit. It is not often I do not come home with something useful that someone else has discarded.Anything that is being discarded that could be of use to someone else is generally placed next to the bin. Nothing of value remains long. 

Not much to write home about this time but some large planter and some firewood for next winter.