Australia: Winter Is Coming
Fast forward just barely over a month really from that last entry. During this month in the suburban bubble of Orange County California I was shocked to discover my phone was actually insured against theft and the phone company wasn't going to wriggle out of it by some small print, they volunteered the revelation in fact. My data, the overwhelmingly more important thing, was gone forever, but at least I wasn't out a phone. Other than that I tried to eat as much pizza and In-n-Out burger as I could because by December 16th I was boarding a plane for Australia.
You may or may not recall I already posted one entry about Oh the heady days of summer here in Geelong.
To this I would just like to add that as we've gotten into winter (I think May = November), "sideways rain" has become the new normal. Days beginning at around 40f (I have yet to convert myself to the heretical celsius system) and topping out at 60, are, in my opinion, far far far too cold for civilized man. Now before you scoff entirely at my laughable Southern California perception of hardship please consider at least that while most people get to work in temperature controlled offices, I work in either the open air or an unheated shed, and even when I'm not at work I can be found hovering directly over a portable radiator which doesn't do much in my thin sided trailer home. I've lived through winter in Sweden (59 degrees north), THIS IS WORSE. At least there I was usually indoors and when I was outdoors in the snow, it was appropriate to wear thick snow clothes.
I find myself answering "sooo cooold" whenever anyone from elsewhere asks me how I'm doing every time and I think this has been the answer every day for at least a solid month, maybe month and a half. Also I find that in the northern hemisphere, the onset of winter is mitigated by all the holidays, that's what they're there for after all. Halloween marks the onset of crispness, the thanksgiving feast is about halfway through the darkening days of Autumn, and then at the very heart of it you have Christmas and New Years to look forward to. Here, all those holidays are wasted in the middle of summer where they don't belong and as the days get darker there is nothing to look forward to except the day the days begin to get longer again. I've found myself fixating on the date of the winter solstice like some kind of devout pagan.
But seriously I feel the lack of holidays in the winter here really makes it much harder to bare. As the snow piles up around their houses, Swedes can look forward to spending a day watching Donald Duck movies (for some reason??) and a smörgåsbord of 12 different kinds of pickled herring, apparently something Swedes look forward to, but I don't even have the comfort of glögg!
I found a lovely cottage to move into next week though so that should improve things a bit. It's nearby, in the country, outside the one-tiny-general-store townlet of Moriac, I'll be sharing it with one young woman, who says she lights an actual fire in the fireplace every evening. Sold right there!
Work right now primarily consists of making beehives for the upcoming year, but I have more than enough time to make them and if I could I'd be out of here in an instant to flee to the northern hemisphere for two or three weeks -- unfortunately apparently the visa process for my more permanent visa requires I not leave the country while it's being sorted out so I'm stuck here for now, huddled over the radiator.