|
|
|
It's so great to see Julie finally fired up about a job. At the end of her first week, she asked for an informal meeting with her boss & her boss's boss, so that she could run the changes she intends to make past them & ensure their support. After that, she will sign her employment documents & submit them. Talk about taking charge! She is the only permanent, with a small team of casuals. On Wednesday, the girls were carefully tearing out the plastic window from the window envelopes received in the mail, before putting them in the recycling. Why? Because that's the way we do it. Well, I'm in charge now & that stops right here, right now. Cool! And our solar panels have been installed on our north-facing roof. You might notice the bottom of the inverter on the top left of the PuppyCam picture. It's a 1.4KW system of 8 panels in a single bank, & when I just checked, the bright winter sunshine in the middle of the day is producing 950W. It produces, on average, the same amount of power that we use & feeds it into the power grid. The standard meter has been replaced by an electronic one that measures our consumption separately from the feed. The good news is that the ACT Government is poised to legislate on the multiplier used to pay us for the power generated - 3.8! Which means that they pay us 3.8 times the normal tariff for the power that we produce. We have installed a larger than necessary inverter, so that later on, we can add another 2 banks of panels on the other half of the roof & it will handle the additional load. On Saturday morning, while Julie went off to work, I went in with her & then on to help out with the Motorcycle Riders Association Blanket Run, which saw 250 motorbikes comes streaming into Garema Place in Civic. All up they raised $2850 for Canberra Community Care. Julie has had to come to terms with working some "interesting" shifts - on Wednesday she starts at 06:45. Now that's what I call interesting! The garden has responded wonderfully to the soaking it got last month & I now have weeds springing up as if it was Spring, not Autumn. And yesterday's reading on the solar panels was that they had generated 50 KWh in 90 hours of operation, which means they are producing a daily average of 500 watts. Funny the things you can see in a series of photos, but not as they happen. Case in point: the tree in the courtyard losing its leaves over the last couple of weeks. I have included the set in the webcam highlights series for your perusal & enjoyment. And on a lighter note, I picked up a dose of diarrhoea late in the afternoon at work. Coming home on the scooter was a very enlightening experience. Amazing how hard it is to ride while squeezing your bum cheeks together - it's all wrong, you're supposed to relax! This month's photo gallery ends with a general collection, including the dogs being "attentive" (yes, there was food involved), the truck that a few people thought we had bought, but was really just the one on show at the Convention Centre for the Truck Drivers National Summit (note the new uniform), miscellaneous wildlife, including an indication of how close the kangaroo mob gets to where I work, and a classic shot of the sun rising through the heavy fog one morning. Winter is here!
|
