On seasons
I miss fall.
Well, no. Let's be honest. I miss seasons. Brisbane is just outside of the real tropics (and it's further from the equator than the places I grew up in in south Texas! Ha!), and therefore has two settings. Sorta pleasantly warm in the day with holy crapola it's cold at night, to dear Lord in Heaven have mercy on us all.
First, let me explain. While Australia has an incredibly high standard of living (I can vouch for this!), as a civilized nation, they have yet to discover the wonders of home insulation. Well, that's not true, they've discovered it, but too late for it to have been used in my current residence. Which means that when it's 45 degrees F outside, it's 49 degrees inside. Give or take a shiver.
The Mister mocked me for wandering around the house in towels and coats and extra t-shirts and extra socks in the winter (June! July! August! Aaaaagh!), saying I was a wussy and hadn't I lived in New York for so many years, but he has yet to fully understand the stellar-furnace-like power of the radiator. I lived in more than one place that required me to use the window as my thermostat. Oh, and all that heat actually stuck around, since brick and cinderblock make for decent insulators.
Anyway, the grand total of days in which I needed a hoodie in order not to feel uncomfortably cold: three. The rest of the time I was just fine in a t-shirt/shirt combo. Or a long-sleeve/short-sleeve t-shirt combo. A scarf was optional if the wind was kicking up. Is that winter? No. It's not.
See, seasons, such as they are around here, are like an arrow head. At the dangerous bit that you shoot into things, that's summer. Punctuated by a sun that's about two miles from the face of the earth. On either side are the bits that make the sides of the arrow. That's "spring" and "fall autumn" ("fall" isn't used around here because all the deciduous trees died out in the heat of the nearby sun, leaving instead trees that shed their bark a lot. I don't get it either).
Winter is the bit that gets tied to the shaft and generally is further forward than the side points that I've labelled spring and fall autumn. That's how useless winter is around here.
So what I get, generally speaking, are a stretch of days in August, September, and October, and April, May, and early June that are pleasant and lovely and great for leaving windows open. November through February is when the road heats up so much it sticks to the soles of your shoes, and eucalypts stand a scary chance of spontaneously combusting because of all the oil in their leaves. I am not making that up. And that leaves the tepid months of late June and all of July.
I want a proper winter! So many of my clothes are cooler weather clothes, and I like wearing them better because I think I look like a beached something in summer wear. Bleh.
And Christmas is wrong, wrong wrong I tell you when it's 90-something degrees outside and the sun is twelve inches from your skin and while there's beer and lemonade and grilled prawns and sausages, there's also a Christmas Pudding. Christmas puddings are awesome, but not in the dead of a Brisbane summer. Imagine slathering yourselves in bread pudding at the height of a power-outage August in NYC.
Gah.