The Advanced 1300 Lego Set...

...offers unrivalled construction opportunities.

Batteries and plan for the dome not included. (Dome available in the 1400 Brunelleschi expansion pack.)

Severe Weather Warning

When it rains here, it's a news item. Normally, it's because we need the water, but as per the previous post relating to the one-day floods here, sometimes it's because it's news to us. We keep an eye on the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Weather Radar, but I'd never seen dark brown 'heavy' rain on it before:
This was preceded by a new noise we'd never seen before like someone chucking large ball bearings on our naturally noisy tin roof. It sounded like that because it was, essentially. Before the rain proper arrived we had the 'golf ball' hail.

Well, OK, it wasn't golf balls, but it was much bigger than I'd ever seen (no news to Bev) so in the interests of precise blogging and my obsessively non-fiction writing nature, here's a shot of a couple of the slightly melted hailstones with coins to measure against. The hail's about the size of a 5c piece (slightly smaller than a Euro 5c, or bigger than a TTC token!) For those in England, the 50c piece is the same size as the British 50p, the 5c about the size of the 5p.

Now awaiting the showers of fish. Blue Grenadier, please.

James

PS - Someone else got the golf ball hail. This photo from the Age.


PPS: And my friend Rob found this mention of showers of fish in the Northern Territory, here. Be careful what you joke about!

Glod, glod, glod, glod...*

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images - via the Globe and Mail article

Not to be outdone, the Canadian men's hockey team figured out how to do it, too.

Go you canucks! I'll be wearing my Olympic jumper with pride tomorrow. (Fleece. It's a fashion statement. - If you're Canadian.)


* Terry Pratchett reference for Sharon and Susan (and James)

Tower of tumbling strawberries

Late summer is in the air and autumn is coming. With it comes the thoughts of cooking treats and even having the oven on again. Of course, on a 30 degree afternoon it's hard to remember what you were thinking that morning when it was a misty 18.

The meringue mountain is wreathed in puffy clouds of rose-water scented cream. A scattered shower of strawberries has landed on the mountain slopes, lightly dusted with sugar-coated rose petals (sneakily snuck from beautiful roses up and down the street, ones that blew open in the heat and that are neglected enough to never have been sprayed).

And it was good. Good thing there were six of us to polish it off!