captlychee and the Sunny Day
So, the weather on the ABC News was predicting a frighteningly hot day with babies being boiled in the car, old people collapsing all over the place, species facing extinction, extinction facing them back, brownouts, blackouts and interruptions to power supply, three quarters of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse turning up to glare balefully at we poor slobs as the Earth rotated but the climate spiralled into anthropogenic doom and all the other nonsense it goes on about to try and make you take Global Warming seriously.
They must have said something that worked because I thought I'd better Do Something about it. Powerless to inform the general public of any policy they could take, and even more powerless to affect either the weather or the Government response to it, I decided to think locally and act domestically. I leapt up from the blow-up bed at around 5:30AM, performed the morning ablutions with a speed that left me slightly daunted and a lot more respectful of the powers of weather reporting, and leapt to the front or Eastern part of the house to see what could be done.
The 6:27AM dawn looked like this:
Dawn at 6:27AM
It was clear from that photo that the sun was coming up, so the possibility of infernal heat blazing down on the house out of a clear blue sky was on both the cards and the agenda, so I couldn't with any safety alter my resolve to Do Something. Fortunately, the owners of the place had equipped it with blinds and drapes, so I could've closed them and cut down on the light entering the house. As anyone who has experienced heat knows, this doesn't work. The benefit is psychological. What happens is the sun hits the windows, heats up the glass, and then the glass transfers the heat indoors. The air behind the drapes gets heated up and flows out into the house and thus you end up living in a dark sweatbox like some kind of 1930's prisoner or 1850's slave. Come to think of it, a windowless sweatbox was what I had to work in on some days at the ol' ATO, so it's still a common experience. I mean 'common' in the medical sense-more than 3% of the time.
But because this house was built back when people actually built for the actual climate not some blowhard from the Greens' concept of it, this house also had external awnings. Awnings have the excellent quality of keeping the sun off the windows and thus preventing, or at least mitigating, the aforementioned insolation heating you can read about in the previous paragraph. (Matter of fact, you probably have already.)
But would they work? There are a few broken things in the place and I didn't think the awnings would've been used that often, and it might be that they had fallen into disrepair along with so much else here. In case of that, I had a backup plan, but it involved me sitting in the pub until 6:27PM and that is both expensive, might cause a certain drowsiness about my person and would probably not be too enamoured by the pub either, whichever one of them it would be that I chose for my custom. And it wouldn't be until 10:00AM at the earliest and I despise going to the pub before noon, since that is one of my personal signs of alcoholism. Another one is drinking in the afternoon and alone, but people who think that have never experienced true Global Warming style heat, and are also probably the sort of people who have 627 friends on their Facebook account and go out on Fridays to scream at each other over the top of a putrid cover band while paying $AU9.50 for a schooner of watered-down mid-strength New Zealand-inspired lager. So that plan was very much a last resort.
The more immediate plan was to get the awnings down. Fortunately for this plan, Kerryn had found the hook-on-a-pole thing that you use to hook onto the iron loop that is on the rail that you use to pull the awning down (and what a way to explain that-bloody hell). However, unfortunately I couldn't see the loop, so it looked like it was going to be a case of me flailing about with the iron end of the hook pole until I found either the loop or a window pane.
Fortunately (and you see how that explains the vicissitudes of life in a nutshell) the loops on the awnings weren't that high. I could probably reach them if I stood close to the window and us stretched up to reach them. I might not be able to pull down on them, but it would tell me where to put the hook. I had to get close enough to the house to grind it like a stripper's pole, but I suppose the world currently lacks a house/Hippy hybrid for goo reason, so that's something. In the immediate time, though, I had the location of the loop, and could thus (after a few false starts) insert the hook and thus pull the awnings down.
I was delighted to find that they were in pretty good nick:
Awnings Down 6:42AM
It was a relief, surprise and triumph to get the awnings down without tripping over, smashing a window, impaling myself on the hook pole, emitting carbon or questioning Global Warming-although the last was a near-run thing, as you can probably imagine.
The Undraped Window 6:43AM
As you can see from the photo above, I hope, I didn't close the awnings on all the windows. I didn't want the old, dark house effect and the awnings were better protection for the main room with the computers in it than protecting a room I never go into except to watch the TV for half an hour a night for the news. So, even if the temperature reached the horrific levels prescribed by the Global Warming motif or even the weather bureau, it would be of no consequence in that room.
By 6:53AM the sun was shining on the windows, so I'd made it just in time:
The Sun shines: 6:53AM
Flushed with the pride of a job well done, I settled in to await the furious causticity (if there is such a word) of the upcoming day. But the weather stayed relatively cool, or relatively warm, depending on your point of view. When I say it didn't take long to work out why this was, it'll be obvious in a minute that it did, but by 9:56AM I thought it prudent to nip out to have a look at why the temperature just wasn't reaching prostrating levels.
Cloudy Day 9:56AM
And so that's the story of the hottest day.