The first three weeks of June are my least favourite time of year. It's officially winter, it's got seriously cold, and the days are still getting shorter. I hang out for the solstice and when it arrives I make mulled wine to celebrate. Quite a lot of mulled wine.
In the meantime the Weatherpixie over there on the right says more rain and so does the Bureau of Meteorology. Apparently it's going to stop for a few minutes tomorrow and Thursday and then it's going to start again.
Yes, of course the rain is a blessing, particularly here in Adelaide where a matter of weeks ago we were staring straight down the barrel of the gun and the death of a city looked like a real possibility. For the people down at the Lower Lakes and the Murray Mouth I think it is already too late (ask the Ngarrindjeri people about that), but here in the city and out in the country it's filling the creeks and the rivers, the reservoirs and the tanks and the dams. It's saving the gardens. People's lawns are growing back unbidden. Animals are fat and happy. Paddocks will soon be covered in the soft green fur of incipient wheat and barley. You don't get that from occasional little gentle drippy rain, you get it from the regular roaring, thundering floods of the kind that washed away half my back yard last night when the heavens opened and terrified the cats out of their little furry minds.
Now whether it's my advancing age and concomitant decrepitude, or the fact that I don't trust this house and its outbuildings not to leak or indeed fall down or blow away, or the fact that the phrase 'extreme weather events' seems to describe accurately what's been happening for the last few years, or more nebulous and less tangible anxieties being projected onto the weather, or some hideous combination of all those things, is something of which I can't be sure.
But there's one thing I'm completely sure of. I really, really need it to stop raining. Just for a week or so. Please.
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Blessed as I currently am with a fairly watertight sort of house (except for the condensation on the windows, which is extremely drippy) I am loving the rain. My garden has perked up, but the dams I can see from the highway when I head to Melbourne still aren't filled. They're not even puddles. All this rain and still the ground is not saturated enough to have runoff.
As much as I tell myself I am being good to the environment because of all the trees I have planted, my house is an insulated box which is easy to heat and cool etc etc I still feel guilty when I use the dryer to ensure that the kids have dry clothes for school and daycare. With a toilet training toddler, that's a lot of clothes. It stopped raining for 1 day last week, and I got a line full of clothes dry. Happy, happy day.
Yeah yeah, I know. I don't want it to stop completely. Just long enough for me to get my breath.
Sorry Mindy, comments crossed. I know exactly what you mean about the clothes on the line. But given the way businesses go on wasting both power and water in order to justify not downsizing their budgets for those things, I cannot for the life of me see how a minority of hard-working, conscientious people in private homes struggling to do the right thing at the micro-level is going to make a blind bit of difference. I expect to feel slightly more Pollyannaish about this after June 21 though. Light, candle, curse, darkness etc.
I spent Sunday afternoon by the fire, whippet in lap, rain drumming down and reading a good, big novel. 'The Children's Book', to be exact, which took me a bit of time to get into, but now I'm realy enjoying. It's so rare to get a Sunday like that and feel warm and secure in your own little space. So, I'm enjoying the rain, but I'm also running out of clothes. No clothes dryer, just good old-fashioned clothes-horses fom me. But I don't have kids, so I don't have to outfit a horde.
Fine, I started The Children's Book last night and I know what you mean but I think I can see what she's doing with all that detail, giving it a kind of documentary feel to balance against the whole fanciful and 'fairy' element and play both ways of seeing the world off against each other.
That's a whole nother post though. Series of posts, if I can see my way to it.
It's stopped raining here, and our weather usually follows yours.
I don't know that I could face another lap of the Children's Bach, having written about it in my thesis...I have been re-reading Alice Munro's Lives of Women and Girls for the first time since first year Uni.
El, no, Book, not Bach -- The Children's Book, the new AS Byatt.
I wrote a fair chunk of a book about The Children's Bach myself and I don't feel ready to revisit it either, classic though it be.
I love that Alice Munro, and there's a great deal more of her work that I haven't read and should have, though. I will inevitably lose my job sooner or later and when I do there will be years' worth of fiction-reading waiting for me.
I hope it's later PC, I still get a quiet "I know her (in the blogoshpere)" thrill when I see your byline the short book reviews in the SMH in the weekend. Not that that is a reason to hang onto a job you don't like of course.
WV is reminding me I ate too many bikkies at afternoon tea time - wayst. Or perhaps encouraging me to get back to work.
Book, not Bach -- The Children's Book, the new AS Byatt.
When the Baron mentioned The Children's Book the other day, I thought at first she was referring to a picture book she'd brought, perhaps for her niece.
Maybe you could put on the Bach while you're reading Byatt, it would almost be like reading 'The Children's Bach'.
PC, I think it's the kind of novel that I have to read a decent whack in one sit to really get into the rhythm of it. You may be right about balancing hte factual after the fairy tale. After a while I think it turns into a really good page-turning soap, in the best possible way. I started wanting to know what happens next to the characters and the history started to work well for me.
The novel would be a whole series of posts and would be fascinating to read, if you can see your way clear to do it.
I spent an intermittently rainy weekend reading The Children's Book too. And loving it - no one does material detail like Byatt. (I think it helps that I like the "things" of her period - and that the beginning immediately put me in mind of "Ballet Shoes", with the V&A and all, and so I was able to deal with the intertexts.)
But the rain: I got two weeks' worth of washing dry in the brief sunshine and by cranking up the column heater...but discovered too late an ancient leak in our wardrobe room, and so lost two beloved shoes to mildew.
I also need a temporary break in the weather to restore me to good shoe-mur.
Tonight we have strong winds, starry skies with intermittent light showers. Very exciting.
My seratonin levels have plummeted of late, so maybe a bit of high wind lashing at the gums, will up the adrenalin and compensate a bit.
Ah the solstice yes, after which I find it gets seriously cold!
I know, I know. It is 2 degrees here, and whatever I walked the dogs in this morning was something between rain, snow and sleet. It was going kind of sideways and drifty, but not actually settling. When I got home to the rain gauge there were 3 mm of it, and I know you know this PC, but freezing and muddy as I was, I still wanted to do a little jig. The dams are nowhere near filling, although there was a tiny grebe on one looking very chuffed. Part of my washing has been hanging on the line getting rinsed for 3 days, apart from whatever that bunch of thing on the ground is, that it is too cold to go out and rescue. I too long for the solstice though, because at 6 am, my usual dog walking time, it is dark and yuk. Still, I say, drop another 2 degrees and let it snow!
Tyaakian
Re the rain: still vividly remembering the horror that is the late Melbourne summer of only 4 months ago and looking at the thermometer reading 46 degrees... I don't care if it rains and freezes until spring.
Re The Children's Book - nearly half way through - it is disturbing me enough that I couldn't face it last night and had to read something lighter. I do think it is quite stunning though.
-3 here this morning. Brrrrrrrrrr
Two days without now, PC. I managed to get the lawn mowed yesterday afternoon. It is looking very green and lush.
I'm feeling very sorry for people who were burnt out in the bushfires and are now having to deal with the cold and snow whilst living in caravans and buses.
Looking muchly forward to the Byatt posts. Muchly.
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