farmdoc's blog post number 10

Last Monday I awoke to a frost. The grass and birdbath outside my window showed me that, but not that the minimum overnight temperature was -0.1ºC, the relative humidity was 94% and the barometric pressure was 1003.9hPa and rising. You see, I am the ardent owner of a La Crosse WS-3600 weather station that sits on an 8-metre mast outside my Mole Creek bedroom, and sends data by radio signal to a touch-screen display near the dining table. I bought my WS-3600 with money from my Auntie Eva Ulman. My father’s oldest sibling and only sister, she was born in 1905 in Melbourne where she died in 2004 – six days short of her 99th birthday. She never married. Maybe because she lived alone for her last 50+ years, she was famously talkative, though no doubt she adored her family. I think I had a special place in her heart, and I know she has one in mine. When I was a lad she took me to places few other kids had seen, including the driver’s cab of a locomotive at Spencer Street Station, and the Captain’s bridge of a P&O Orient Line cruise ship at Station Pier. I decided to spend the money she bequeathed me, on something I would use frequently, to remind me of her. So if in future I bombard you with weather data, you can blame, or thank, my Auntie Eva.