Nerd Em's Adventures
How far are you willing to drive after the low fuel indicator light comes on? How low do you let your mobile phone battery go before you know you absolutely have to plug it in before it shuts down on its own? Do you turn on “battery saver” and eke out a few more minutes of work and conversation before you finally go find somewhere to recharge?
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Things are coming to an end. The exotic dancers trees are starting to disrobe, concluding their brilliant and flashy show this year. The COVID-19 restrictions are unwinding. I trust Nature’s signals more than I trust the government’s, but I do forecast that winter 2020 will be an interesting one to see how it all unfolds. What will the weather do? What will the mixing of people in the traditional flu season do? We’re all an experiment in one big petri dish right now. Read more
Everything is confused. The humans. The flies. The plants. The birds. Perhaps this is what happens when you cross a pandemic with climate change. It’s like a cross-crisis punnet square with inheritance probabilities that edge toward certainties. Read more
Earlier this year, everything was on fire. Or so it seemed. It was estimated that 80 percent of the Australian population suffered through the effects of long-duration smoke. The area burned was so extensive across the country, and the fires lasted for so long, that it is now called Black Summer. We’ve had an Ash Wednesday (1983), a Black Friday (1939) and a Black Saturday (2009), among others. But yep, this time we got a whole summer.
And so that seems a long time ago. We’ve moved on to another crisis – extensive in its impacts and effects on human health, the economy and ‘life as we knew it’. It makes summer feel so far removed. So when the leaves began to fire up this autumn, it has been hard to believe that we are just ending a summer that feels at least three seasons ago. Read more
It’s Easter Sunday. A public holiday. A long weekend. My dad always said we were not allowed to get hurt on holiday weekends, because under no circumstances was he going to take us to the emergency room in a busy period like that.
So, it’s a good thing my Dad is not here then, for my first trip to an emergency room in Oz. Read more