Oh, that’s right. Am I about to tell you about the cool bats that came out at Moonlight Cinema when they were about start the screening of Die Hard 4.0? No. About going to Prahran Market and buying, among other things, 8 unnecessary mangoes? The amazing Christmas weekend spent with the other Yankee orphans at Jesse’s parents’ house? Well, maybe later. But first: it is apparently more interesting at this moment to talk about the weather.
I do not do well in heat. I’m always bloody hot (it’s been suggested that I must be naturally extra warm blooded, which is why all manner of biting insects seem to be so very attracted to me). It must always have been kind of annoying to hear me whine on about how warm it is when others are freezing their asses off, but things were manageable.
Then there was that time I came to Australia in the middle of summer.
I’ve been lucky so far, and it’s ranged from about 20 (68F) to 30 degrees (86F). It’s rained about once a week since I’ve been here, a gradual buildup of heat over the course of a few days, followed by a warm and muggy rain and a subsequent day or two of relief. But this, of course, has only been early summer.
As we near January, the summer weather characteristically gets more and more merciless. Yesterday was 36 degrees. So while Samin was in the Berkeley hills bundled up against the 6C (42.8F) post-Christmas pre-New Year limbo, I was making futile attempts at pushing off heatstroke with my feeble and sunburned arms. It was 36C yesterday, which is not a bra size. Yesterday, when it was 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit and I should have been hiding inside with a cold drink and the shades drawn, I was instead trekking up and down Sydney Road, ravaging all the fabric shops in the area in search of raw materials for The Invitation costumes.
From 12pm to 5pm, I walked up one side of the street and back down the other, stopping for lunch at a lonely Turkish place where the only other patrons to come in had a family argument in another language and one of the two older babushka-clad ladies stormed out in a tearful rage within ten minutes of sitting down. It’s the heat, I tells ya.
By the time I got back to the top (bottom?) of the strip, I knew I wanted to stop back in the first shop I’d visited to get a few half-metres of stuff…but I couldn’t quite remember how far up the shop was. I walked up a block or two, but suddenly got hit with a wave of I’ve been walking around in 36 degree heat for the last five hours and consumed a litre of water and just cannonballed a Jamba Juice-like Aussie equivalent and I still feel like I’m about to pass out heat stroke is imminent fuck that fabric shop I need to get home and cover my head now.
The 10-day forecast predicts no rain in the coming weeks to temper the sweltering heat. On Monday, it is supposed to reach 40 degrees. This is equivalent to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. On New Year’s Eve, the city of Melbourne will effectively be running a fever.
This is not unusual for Melbourne, as a matter of fact the frequent rain has been the real anomaly this year. I really can’t keep whining like this.
But c’man, when has that ever stopped me before?
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