Grilled gay novelist with ketchup and onions

The sounds you hear issuing from the hills area of Adelaide right now are squidging, squodging noises ... the kind of sound a piece of cheese makes when it MELTS as it sits on its cracker, and slips off the plate and slithers onto the floor and goes ... squodge. It's a technical term from the Latin, meaning "to be reduced, by inescapable outside influences, to a goo-like consistency which has little or no potential for life functions to continue within."

It's not just Keegan making these sounds. It's most of the city.

The weather forecast for yesterday was 41C, and we actually suffered 43.2C.

The forecast for today is 44C. If the Bureau of Meteorolololology misses its collective guess by the same margin, we shall be stewing in 46.2C degrees. Let me do the math for you, using the rough old rule of thumb calculation to convert Celsius (or Centigrade) into Fahrenheit (or Real Temperatures.) You double the number, subtract the first digit, and add 32. Therefore, 44C is 112F. And 46C is 115F.

And just to make quite sure US and Canadian readers are in no doubts, the sadistic morons the the B of M measure temperatures down here IN THE SHADE. Whenever you see a weather forecast for Australia, those are SHADE temperatures. You can add anything from 30F to 50F to that, to get the sun temperatures.

And the news is, this "hot spell" continues for the foreseeable future.

Hence the squidging, squodging noises. We went out for groceries at eight in the a.m., and the parking lots were already fairly full; by the time we walked out of the mall, they were full. The problem was, the overnight "minimum" temp was 95F, so it was like an oven outside at dawn.

Fortunately, this doesn't happen more than a couple of times in the year, and if it's going to happen, bet your bottom dollar it'll be in January and/or February. The rest of the year is more or less fine and dandy --

Hold that thought! Now I'm going to give you a link back to a post I, uh, posted, on Tuesday, August 5, not much under six months ago: On strike for a shorter winter. Click back to that. Go on, I dare you.

Right now, it's long COLD, RAINY GRAY DAYS I'm dreaming about, while the country bakes like a potato on the grill. The garden is getting charcoal broiled.

This is what we want, and keep it coming:



Well, you can dream. This particular dream will come true in something like May -- possibly even April. There's an annual horse race meeting locally, at a place called Oakbank. It takes place as a family camping event on the Easter long weekend, and there's such a tradition of the weather breaking with a monster storm at Easter, the Oakbank Races are affectionately known as Croakbank, because it's paradise for, uh, frogs.

Roll on Easter.

Cheers,
MK