Crackin’ the SADS
Ok, so it’s summer. Not just December-to-February kind of summer, but more the So-You-Doubt-Global-Warming-Now-Sucker kind. We’ve had an unprecedented three days of over 43ºC (109.4ºF) – yesterday topping 45ºC (112ºF) – with bushfires, blackouts and a completely melted public transport system. Despite the “cool” change last night and my windows being open all evening, the ambient temperature inside my flat is still well over 30ºC: sticky, to say the least.
And the worst part? Walking around the city after work the past few days, watching people completely unfazed by the heat. They’re quite happy in their little shorts and singlets and summer dresses, hair and make up perfect, barely a red cheek or bead of sweat to be seen. The papers have been filled with people lying on beaches in the middle of the day, relaxing in the shallows. Hang on, people . . . lying, on the beach, in the full sun, in 45ºC heat? Skin cancer, anyone?
Personally, I hate seeing the weather forecast for anything over 30ºC (86ºF). Yeah, call me a wimp, but I’m also a pasty, red-headed northern-European type. Give me winter any day. These past few days I’ve been getting dizzy spells, I can’t cook for the heat, I can’t think, I’m getting stir-crazy from being unable to go dancing or for walks . . . while everyone else is happy in their summer dresses and board shorts, I’m trudging around the city all shiny from my sunscreen, red in the face from the heat, my hair all lanky and wilted.
But the worst part? The sun. I don’t know whether it’s an excess of Vitamin D production, or if it’s just a red-head thing, but being in the sun really gets me down and stresses me out. I get miserable, grumpy, panicky, I can’t think straight, and really angry. It’s really distressing to be caught out in the sun for me. But you tell people you hate summer and they treat you like you’re The Grinch – yet if you are affected by the winter weather, you’ve apparently got Seasonal Affective Disorder and everyone piles sympathy on you.
Does anyone else experience this? Maybe because we’re so far south here in Melbourne it tilts us closer to the sun’s rays in summer, because I know I didn’t experience anything like this in Germany, where I was out in 30ºC weather in singlets, no sunscreen, and not a single extra freckle was gained, or in Fiji where the heat was pretty consistent throughout the day and the night but was much easier to cope with. Here, the sun is harsh, the heat dry, and the paceof life unchanged. Bring back winter, is all I can say . . .
Snow!
I’ve got a load of shorts to post from this Thirty Days of Text, but I’ll get to that eventually. Really, I should be writing right now, but something far more exciting happened today so that will have to wait.
I saw snow.
Real snow, too. Not sleet, not hail (well, we saw hail too), but real snow. It’s been about fourteen years since I saw any snow, so for me this was pretty damn exciting.
I stayed over at my parents’ place this weekend as we were going out for Dad’s birthday for lunch today. Skyhigh, Mt. Dandenong. Window-seat, fantastic views of Melbourne, and they do veggo and gluten-free so the whole family is covered. As far as lunch with my family goes, this is a pretty safe bet. We check the weather before we leave, it looks freakin’ cold, so we all put our scarves and our gloves on and head out in Dad’s 4WD.
So we’re driving up the twists and turns, and not long past The Basin, Mum starts going “Look over there! Look over there!” Sure enough, there was a big blob of snow. Then there were a few more blobs. Then the fern trees were covered in the white stuff. People were stopped at the side of the road, taking pictures of it. The further up we went, the more snow was falling, the whiter everything was. People were making snowmen and kids were running around chucking snowballs at each other. Everything looked like a Christmas card – there is no other way to describe it.
(for those not from Melbourne, the Mt. Dandenong area is cold-climate rainforest, but there are plenty of old homesteads, a lot of them in a sort of Tudor or old German style, and there are plenty of non-native trees around. Very much Christmas card territory when covered in snow)
And you know what? To me, it was magical. Snow is such a novelty and I love winter so much, it was so beautiful with all the snow on the ferns and the bare branches of the deciduous trees amongst the eucalypts. Sadly, none of us brought cameras so I have no photo evidence to show for it and I’m having trouble finding any photos online, but for a brief window of an hour before the sun came out and melted it all away, I finally got to see real snow again.
I love winter 
