even more ideas

Another collection of random things spotted that might one day be useful...

I love this concept for painting stairs from Maryam's blog... stencilling, with a different pattern on each.

Or how about a roof shingled in old vinyl? (via Treehugger)  It could be interesting for something like a carport where it didn't matter if it wasn't 100% watertight.  Apparently this guy just put a nail through the middle holes in the record and that was enough to hold it down.  (There's more photos at Treehugger site)

Perry Bird Pickets - a brilliant store in Melbourne that sells all kinds of cast ironwork to go on verandahs and fencing.  It isn't cheap, but is nowhere near as expensive as I'd expected either - in some cases even cheaper than wooden fretwork.  

Finally, a couple of my favourites from Martha Stewarts "50 tips for the kitchen"...  (yes yes I know - even though no-one could do all she suggests without a fleet of staff, she still has some brilliant ideas).  I like the idea of having glass storage positioned partly in front of a window so that you get light shining through it (tip 11).  And I really like these "birds beak" shelves (tip 2) - apparently it's an old carpentry style for adjustable shelving.  It's functional but also decorative.  

  

daily weather during 2010

Here's my 5th annual round-up of the weather for Maryborough (the nearest weather station to us), courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology.  For previous years see: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006

Here's a graph showing the maximum & minimum temperatures reached each day, in celsius:



The hottest it got was 42.8 on 16th January 2010. The coldest was -2.2 on 28th June.

But the big news in 2010 was the rainfall.  We had a ton more rain than normal - so much so that I had to increase the axis scale! This graph shows it plotted cumulatively:



For the year as a whole we got nearly 1000mm of rain - 950.7mm to be precise.  This was a HUGE increase, nearly double the rainfall of 2009 which had already been a banner year.  The chart comparing historical rainfalls shows this vividly:



Overall, 2010 turned out to be the second wettest year recorded for Maryborough since records began in 1878.  It was beaten only by 1973 when there was 1022mm.  There was one record-breaking figure though.  In November we had over 155mm of rain in 2010 - the highest ever recorded.