Merry Christmas to all of you!
Here in Eastern Australia time zone, its only about 3 hours until Christmas! We are UT+10.
I sincerely hope you all had a great year and wish you well for next year.
I hope none of you have a "brush tail possum" climb down your chimney in the night and run around inside your house as happened to a friend of ours who lives up the road from us (OK this is Australia so "up the road" is actually about 35 km away but still a local). Our friend was alone when woken in the middle of the night, she thought someone had broken in. She was about to call the police but then since crime is not a common thing around here, so she though she would just go look. She was please she hadn't rung the police, she didn't want to look like an idiot having called the police about a criminal possum!
I hope none of you have one of your younger daughters open the front door to find one of the word's top 10 most deadly snakes casually lying on your door step. She opened the door to see what the magpies were going off about. We have befriended an extended family of magpies so they were in fact surrounding the snake and calling out a warning to the humans, very intelligent birds! My daughter saw the snake and immediately went to open the screen door to go an have a closer look (1.5 metres and a screen door is close enough to one of the world's most deadly snakes for most of us), she announced "its a snake and its so cute", my other younger daughter ran to have a look as well and also announced that "Dad, its so cute, come and look". I yelled "keep the door closed you bloody idiots". My wife and other two daughter looked like a mixture of being sick with fear and trying to climb the walls, a more intelligent response.
I hope none of you have smoke so thick almost every day for several weeks now that it is choking and visibility is down to a kilometre most days (the worst day was down to under 450m, I know because I could not see my neighbour's house). The closest part of the closest fire is about 100km away. However since the area currently burnt, of the fires that are still at this time burning, just in the state of New South Wales, currently totals 2.97 million hectares (for the yanks that's about 7.4 million acres), perhaps you can get an idea of why there is so much smoke. This figure is not including fires that are no longer active, and is not including the fires in the other Australian states. They said on the TV news a few days ago that the total area burnt this year is now greater than the entire country of Denmark, but I didn't hear if they were only talking about NSW or all of Australia but since Denmark is only about 4 million hectares, and our currently burning fires in NSW have already burnt almost 3 million hectares, I suspect they were only talking about NSW. Our rural fire fighters are volunteers and a lot will likely not be home for Christmas this year. On the upside though, most of that land is bush land, national parks etc. so the number of towns houses etc. burnt are not as high as you might expect and very few people have been killed. This is Australia, it does burn, mostly we are used to it, but this year has been extreme. The total area burnt for the entire year last year in NSW was only 280 thousand hectares, not the millions of this year.
I hope none of you have yet another year of wide spread drought, so bad that you have to sell all your cows, including the one with 8 names. But we still have our pet goats and a rabbit who is very cute. On hot days he likes to take advantage of the air-conditioning under my desk next to my feet.
But I do sincerely hope all of you are lucky enough to have something as great as your wonderful extremely precious teenage daughter, after years of bitching, hormones and worrying you about her stupid ideas and ridiculous opinions about ........etc. suddenly come running up to you and throw her arms around you and say the most amazing words a Dad could ever hear "I love you Dad"!
All I had to do to get that was spend 309.5 hours over a year and two weeks teaching her to drive, buy her a good condition cheap old car (that is fast and pretty!) and then let her drive it to school to show her friends!
On balance, life out here in the Aussie outback is great!
I wish you all a wonderful, merry and safe Christmas!
Jim
FreeCAD
