hot in the city

Yesterdays soaring temperatures did not hit me until I left air-conditioned-work at 5:30, then stepped outside into the 39 degree smokey heat. I had heard the receptionist telling someone else how there were power-failures and that traffic was bad as traffic lights were out. I found this was the case in Williamstown Road, and when I got home Joe said we had no power. So no aircon, mustnt keep opening the fridge as everything will defrost, no tv, music, microwave or innernet.

We decided to make the room hotter by cooking sausages on the gas top, then headed for the beach with water bottles and boardshorts. Surprisingly a few (hundred) other people had the same idea. The beach and sea was jam packed full of huge people and even huge-er dogs, just waiting to run out of the water and skake all over you. A kind of personalised hyrdronic cooling system i suppose. Our beach is not a designated 'body beautiful' zone, so anyone can just come along and let it all hang out.

There was a family at the beach that had a boat, 5 kids, a newborn staffordshire bull terrier, and then later on we saw a newborn baby. We think the mother must have given birth while we were there. The kids seemed determined that the puppy would swim in the sea, and the poor mite kept being dropped in the sea and immediatly swimming back to shore and running away from the water, only to be yanked up by one of the bin-lids again.

When we got home, the power was back on and the fridge was beeping at us to say it was too warm. The beeping continued for about an hour until we worked out how to turn the beeping feature off.

Today there is talk of power bans , restricting the use of air conditioners to the ill, elderly or pregnant, with $10,000 fines if you are caught cooling down.

Water ban, electric bans, what next?