What's happening in your world?

[Farseer]

I have just worked out that Queensland is 83x larger than Wales and 7x larger than the entire UK. Even Tasmania is 3x larger than Wales!

Love those stats ! You may be interested to know that the student catchment area for my kids' School of the Air alone is almost twice the size of Victoria and there are, what, another seven Schools of the Air in Queensland besides ours!

Nuytsia, it's usually driving eg the 1000 kms I completed a day or so ago, the 300kms I have to do on Sunday, the next 1000kms I plan to do this coming Monday and yet another 300kms I will have to do on Wednesday...all for various reasons, to various places (and that doesn't include the day-to-day stuff). It sounds a lot, I guess (?), but I have had far, far worse weeks!

On topic...hot and sunny days here , with non-stop air-conditioning for those of us who are soft, and nights just starting to cool down a fraction as we are lead toward winter...still can't go without the a/c though!

[Manephelien]

Temps hit 26 C in the shade here today. Summer really is here!

[Albertosaurus Rex]

It was... almost warm today.

[Nuytsia]

Farseer I boggle at the amount of driving you do!
I used to live in Albany (WA) and knew someone who drove to Perth EVERY weekend (bit less than 500km each way). And I thought they were crazy! I hate driving BLAH!
When you say non-stop aircon do you mean at night as well? Is it really humid where you are? Or just hot?
And don't worry about topic, I deem all topics relevant to this thread.
Manephelien 26 degrees! We are lucky to get that warm most of the time in summer! Finland is much warmer than I realised.
Well we have had two days of sunshine all day so that's nice. Cold this morning (4.5 degrees). Still no damn rain!!!!!

[Mervi]

The thing about Finland is that we go from one extreme to another : we can hit both -30°C and +30°C in the space of 6 months easily (- and I personally prefer the colder end of the spectrum). On the other hand, it's really nice to witness every year nature's race to grow things as quickly as possible: trees get their foliage literally overnight, flowers are *everywhere* and birds sing like crazy trying to determine boundaries in a crowded space. And then in a few months it's all over and we're back to dark and cold and ... dare I say ... peace.

[Nuytsia]

-30 C !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Heh heh that's cold. I think the coldest it's ever got here is probably -7C (and that might happen one night a year if ever).
Do you have dark all day at some point?

[Mervi]

Not here where I live (in the middle of southern Finland) but up in the north they do. Around here, the winter day is at its shortest about 5 hours.

[Lord Punctual]

That's still shorter than my winter days. I'm about as far south as one can go in Canada, and our shortest winter day is about 7 1/2 hours long. That's short enough for me!

I know what you mean about the precipitous spring. Last week we had that "suddenly the trees are green" day, and jus this morning I looked outside and the lawn was both green and covered in yellow dandelions.

Farseer: Schools of the Air are real? I always thought that was a myth they told us to make us feel better about going to a rural high school!

[Farseer]

Well, we had rain here a couple of days ago and with it came a very abrupt cool, getting-ready-for-winter change. It's sunny and about 30 C at the moment, and I am FREEZING to the point where I can't get warm. I now also have an annoying, sniffly cold (thanks Change!), and I can't believe you all manage to survive with this as your maximum temperatures ever, let alone those in the negative ! Nuytsia, I should mention here that it's usually in the height of summer that I begin to think of edging south...4.5 degress your end makes me want to have a thorough re-think!

Years ago my kids and I corresponded with a class from Canada's Prince Edward Island and our idea of a barbeque was quite different from theirs...in their - 25 C winters they would cook all of their meat on a barbeque outdoors and, by the time they got it back inside to actually eat it, it would have refrozen and required thawing again!

Farseer: Schools of the Air are real? I always thought that was a myth they told us to make us feel better about going to a rural high school!

They sure are real, Lord Punctual, and very much a part of my life after thirteen years ! When we began, we used HF radios to correspond with our base school but now use telephone and the internet for On-Air lessons (despite previous posts talking up how technology has opened up our isolated lives, I was a fan of the radio and miss it very much !).

As many people get confused with Schools of the Air as they do with the thought that the RWC isn't a trilogy , with most believing that it is 'home-schooling". While the students do complete their schoolwork at home under the supervision of a parent/home tutor or governess (I have never had a governess !), the work is a firmly-set curriculum provided by the Education Department.

Each 'paper' or unit of work takes about a fortnight to complete and it is then mailed in to the base school for marking and monitoring/reporting purposes before being returned to the student. As well as these correspondence papers, the kids also have an 'On-Air lesson' for 45 minutes each day where they speak via the telephone/internet with their teacher and classmates in a lesson setting eg do Maths on Wednesday, Art on Thursday etc. Here's a link to our school if you'd like to know more http://www.longreacsde.eq.edu.au/index.html .

Glad you said all topics are relevant to this thread, Nuytsia !!

[Lord Punctual]

Very interesting. Your School of the Air sounds like it would combine some of the best features of Home and, er, regular Schooling. The individual attention and pacing of home schooling, combined with the the structure and educational outcomes of traditional school.

I actually live in Nova-Scotia, which is within sight of Prince Edward Island. (Across the Northumberland Strait.) I have to say, I think they might have been pulling your leg about the frozen meat barbecue. For the most part, Canadian barbecues are a summer event. Actually, I had barbecued hamburgers (and chicken skewers) yesterday for dinner. It was about 10-15 degrees C out, so everything was still hot when we got it back into the house! Today it was 17 C, which is very nice and warm for this time of year. I spent most of the evening outside with my Cadets without a jacket on. Of course, I'm pretty cold tolerant but we were all outside in our shirt sleeves.

I think the humidity has a lot to do with how we perceive heat. We have extremely high humidity in the summer, so when it get to more than about 28 C I pretty much either make a point of being out at sea, or hiding in the basement until summer is over.

We do sometimes barbecue in winter. Usually whoever is doing the grilling must consume a great amount of inspiritous beverages in order to handle the cold. However, unless ones baebecue was really far from the house, or one left the meat sitting around beside the grill, I can't really see the meat freezing on the way back to the house. -25 is cold, but it isn't that cold. Also, it doesn't get that cold very often. We usually have a couple of weeks of hard cold around January and February where it drops into the -20s and stays there, but the rest of the winter usually hovers around -15 up to -5, and we even get some winter days when it is 0 or a few degrees above 0.