41 Bloody Degrees

JAN 5 IS THE HOTTEST DAY THIS SUMMER AND the mercury reaches 41 degrees as I am driving home from Dandenong South around 4pm. The northerly winds are kicking up heat waves after heat waves the whole day and brings with it extreme heat that sucks up all the oxygen in the air. One just feels it is suffocating. I hate the hot weather. I really do. It sucks. All day I have this headache that throbs on, and then off, and then on again. It never goes away; like a running electric motor on heat, it just keeps reminding me I am human.

SM gets back from visiting a friend like 6pm and I have already had a Cascade Light and a lie down. The house is like an oven, full of hot, dry air and still. Still hot air is terrible. And no humidity. I dare not even open the windos and doors because the heat will exacerbate the problem. SM is getting ready as we have decided to go some place with air conditioning; whilst I water the garden, the plants, the lawn, to give them a temporary reprieve.

We get into the cool comfort of Westfield Doncaster and surprise, surprise there is a lot of "shoppers" there, I am sure they are thinking the same way as we are. Get into shorts and Ts and window shop in air cond comfort.

We are hungry and plonk ourselves down at Grill'd for food. Hmmm, the burgers are within our expectation of non greasy, non fatty and just nice burgers. I have a Mighty Melbourne and she a Sweet Chilli Chicken. There is like 10 people ahead of us in the order queue but I swear we get to sink our teeth into our burgers within 5 minutes of our ordering. The guy cooking the meat on the hot grill is doing an awesome job and he should be proud.

When we leave Doncaster at 9pm after window shopping and buying 2 fiction and a Sudoku book my car OAT meter says 37 deg. The rest is history. The cool change did not come until like 2am. I dozed off around 11pm and did not even know SM turned off the air cond and the fan was still going the whole night. Our little discomfort was nothing compared to homes that were engulfed in fire and townships evacuated when I read the news the next day. 5 states were on fire including Victoria.