Many shades of grey

We are only a few weeks into winter.  This year ours has been relentlessly, unusually and depressingly grey.  The sun has barely emerged from grey-blanketed skies for weeks.  

Mandurah's thousands of grey nomads have pulled down their roller shutters, packed up their mobile homes and trundled off to warmer climes. On a cloudy Sunday, with the shops all shut, Mandurah's city centre feels like a ghost town.

One grim day I looked in my wardrobe for something bright to wear and realised that three quarters of my wardrobe now matches my hair: many, many shades of grey.  My new merino tops arrived in the post (black and grey); they are so lovely and warm that I haven't wanted to take them off since.  Accessories and lipstick for colour I say.

We have been enjoying soups and casseroles and pies; I gathered up the free-range grey pumpkins from the back garden and transformed them into a cauldron of spicy and colourful soup.

It is weather for snuggling up by the fire weather and reading.  Everyone I know seems to be sniggering and guffawing through Fifty shades of grey, but not me.  I am too busy reading to plan our next trip away.  We were eyeing up the coldest place in the state, Bridgetown, after falling for it on our way back from Albany.  But instead, like wannabe grey nomads, we are planning our first roadtrip north of Perth.

I can't remember our previous two winters being this dull, dreary, bleak, miserable and cold.   

I never thought I'd say this here, but I wish the sun would jollywell come out.

Wet, wild but not very woolly

I hope I haven't given people the impression that the warm sunny weather this part of the world is known for continues right around the year, because that would be a big fat fib.  While day after day of clear blue skies and warm temperatures are definitely a feature of our @#$%^! summers and glorious autumns, there comes a time every year when that weather pattern comes to a soggy and often spectacular end.  We are usually desperate for rain by that stage so when the rainy season finally arrives we are ready with coats and quilts, casserole pots and new soup recipes.

But rain here is rarely a gentle thing.  It usually arrives as part of explosive electrical storms and wild cyclone remnants.  We get lashed by ferocious winds and soaked by torrential downpours on a regular basis over the rainy winter season.  Astonishing amounts of rain fall then disappear into our sandy soil almost immediately and send my partner off to check his new favourite website. It is a dramatic and exciting season but sadly also dangerous and damaging.

The latest big storm swept through on Sunday, putting paid to our planned family daytrip.  Instead we all hunkered down inside, feeling thankful that we'd just had our chimney swept and had spent the previous day excavating an old water tank from the back of the garden and installing it to use as a woodshed then collecting up all the firewood from around the garden. 

At 2pm my partner was busy reading his book while listening to Lou Reed, my daughter had just taken a cake out of the oven and was online shopping (buying a Slytherin cape - but that is another story), my son had just finished rereading a book and was playing an electronic game, and I too was online shopping.  I had created a cosy online basketload of something I have had little success finding in the shops here: merino tops.

Then there was a very loud bang and the power went out.  The scene outside our living room window was one of complete mayhem.  Huge tumbleweeds of our street's once tidily stacked organic waste collection materials barrelled down the street.  Wheelie bins took flight then slammed into houses.  Fences fell and trees bent in two.  Our street is nestled behind a hill and is quite sheltered from onshore winds so we knew that the houses just a few streets away near the beach must be receiving a terrifying battering.

We settled down to eat cake (lemon, delicious), play our new board game (Carcassonne the City,  fun) and watch the storm.  Finally after a couple of hours the rain stopped, the winds dropped and the sun came out.  Like those idiots you always hear about on the TV news, we went out for a walk around our neighbourhood to survey the damage.  Below is the full extent of the damage on our property.

Further down the road it was a less pretty sight.  Two of the things I love most about our suburb are its somewhat ramshackle style and its huge trees.  Now it is considerably more ramshackle, but not in a good way, and sadly has considerably fewer huge trees.  Every  pigugly Super Six corrugated asbestos fence in the neighbourhood lay flattened and will probably soon be replaced with the equally pigugly modern equivalent: Hardifence. (We have both types and sadly it is all still standing.)  Some houses in our neighbourhood had major damage and it was obvious to us that we might be without power for quite a while this time (our power is forever going off) so we went home to prepare.

We had a lovely Sunday evening eating takeaways by candlelight near the roaring fire while watching a Harry Potter movie together on my iPad. (We tried the "Lumos!" spell with no success.)

The next day at work I charged all our various devices and batteries, rang a firewood dude to arrange a delivery, then on the way home I bought a Mazda2load of tinned food and a wee gas camping stove.  Two hours later our power came back on.  We were without power for 26 hours and fared far better than the thousands of people who are still without power and aren't expected to get it reconnected for days.

Sunday's storm was described as a "once in a decade event" and was the most damaging event ever for the electricity network.  Now there is a severe weather warning for another storm due this afternoon; the warning I've just read says it will have even stronger winds than Sunday's storm.  So I spent this morning creating a nice cosy place for snakes to shelter filling our woodshed,

putting away the patio chairs and cooking strange meals with all the partially defrosted food from the freezer.  And given that this is only the beginning of the wet, wild, stormy season, I think next I'll have another go at buying myself some woolly clothes to wear.

Cyberstalking Bianca

We have a new hobby.  We call it "Cyberstalking Bianca".  This isn't as dodgy as it sounds.  This week we've learned that a cyclone called Bianca is headed our way. See that line where the cyclone's path hits land?  That's where we are.

Every week seems to see Australia copping some "one in ten/twenty/thirty... year" extreme weather event, many of which have devastating consequences.  As a result we have become somewhat weather-obsessed.  The last big cyclone hit this region in 1978 and resulted in the loss of five lives, coastal erosion and widespread damage to property.  Bianca was predicted to be severe and to bring high winds which would cause this region's fire danger risk to go from "extreme" to "catastrophic".

For the past few days we have been following Bianca's progress towards us online.  The weather system has delivered us a run of incredibly hot and disgustingly humid weather - daily highs in the mid-thirties and overnight lows in the high twenties - peppered with electrical storms and a few torrential showers.  I find the high humidity the toughest thing to handle and difficult to find respite from; the sort of air conditioning our rental home has does not work in humid conditions and sitting in the garden is a no-no as Mandurah is currently experiencing an extreme plague of disease-carrying mosquitoes. 

So in what we hoped wouldn't turn into an "evolution at work" situation (like people going down the beach to get photos of an incoming tsunami) we headed to the estuary for a swim, to sit under the shade of a tree and to catch what little breeze was on offer.

The water was as glassy and calm as I've ever seen it.  We were happy just floating or swimming but others found ever more inventive ways to cool off. 

The sky became more and more ominous.  When the thunder and lightning started we headed for home.

Since then we've had cycles of torrential rain, high winds and some eerily calm times.  As the humidity soared I had another desperate poke at the air con system and discovered a fan only setting which gave at least a little respite.

This morning I fired up the computer early to again cyberstalk Bianca and see how long before I should bring in the bins and outdoor furniture.  But Bianca has all but gone.  Just like the many events that were cancelled due to Bianca's imminent arrival, the cyclone warning itself has now been cancelled. 

I can't say I'm disappointed but this will mean that I'll need a new hobby.  A more likely scenario is that I'll return to my old hobby: cyberstalking real estate listings.

Hot, hotter, hottest

After several weeks of the sort of glorious yet comfortable weather I could happily live with my whole life, things cranked up a bit on the temperature front this week. Monday was hot, Tuesday was hotter and Wednesday was a stinker with 37 degrees recorded in Perth. 

Like many people, I can merrily handle stinker days when I'm having my dream-life.  If all I'm required to do is read a novel while lying in a hammock, drink umbrella drinks, swim, take siestas and eventually slope off to a restaurant for tea, then I can pretty much handle any temperature in style.  (Cripes, the last time I did that was 1994.)

But I'll freely admit to being a bit hopeless where hot temperatures and real-life get combined.  Fetching and carrying groceries on foot, minding hot/bothered/exhausted children, push-mowing the lawn, ironing, doing the frenzied pre-babysitter-cleanup, cooking an early dinner then getting spruced up and rushing to a posh 6pm do - all done in temperatures scarily close to my age - tends to turn me into TheOtherDeidre.

One of my children is a wilter too.  On Tuesday night when we were still recovering from the heat of the day, we saw on the weather forecast that Wednesday was going to be even hotter.  Even when I explained that it is always a couple of degrees cooler here than in Perth, this poor child got teary eyed.

So on Wednesday afternoon after the two people in this household with places to be had rushed off to do their thing, TheOtherDeidre and TheOtherChild decided to actually enjoy this weather instead of just endure it. We ignored all the things we should have done and instead headed to the place we call "The Town Baths" (part of the estuary surrounded by floating walkways to make an area like a swimming pool).  After snatching just an hour of dream-life cooling our bodies and our brains, we both got it together enough to cope well with the rest of our hot, busy, real-life day.

On the forecast last night we saw with some relief that today would be back to lower temperatures, but he and I agreed we no longer dread the many stinker days yet to come.

Spot the difference

Monday,

Tuesday,

Wednesday,

Thursday,

Friday,

Saturday,

Sunday.  Repeat several times over.  Yes, life here at this time of the year is lived against a huge blue background.

Then one day this,

and this,

and this,

and we'll all look at each other in surprise and say "clouds!".

If we are lucky it will end up like this,

and we'll all look at each other in astonishment and say "rain!" but it doesn't happen very often.  The next day, blue skies again. 

I'm not complaining but after the second driest winter on record here we sometimes feel a bit naughty to be loving the weather so much.