Favourite Things Friday

It's Friday again which means its time to give some thought to your favourite things from this week.

Since Captain James Cook first set foot on Aussie soil in late Autumn he probably had no idea of exactly how hot it got here when he decided that Australia would be a good place to settle pasty white British people who had previously experienced very little sun. I also wonder if once the First Fleet arrived in late January 1788, in the full heat of Summer, if all they wanted to do was turn around and go home to old Blighty. Can you imagine those poor people in wool clothes and long dresses in our blistering heat? I suspect the only thing that stopped them going home was that most of them were convicts and didn't have a choice. Plus it took 8 months to get here by boat and that was the only way home again. 

I was born and bred in Australia, so I'm used to our weather.  Australian weather is half awesome because even though it gets cold in winter it never gets really cold like Northern Hemisphere winters. We don't have that extreme winter weather you poor suckers to the north get. All our extreme weather all gets stored up for our Summer.  

Summer to me means sleeping in the bath or on the bathroom floor as a kid because the majority of people didn't have ducted air conditioning in those days and bedrooms got really hot. Too hot to sleep in. Summer to me means salad and sliced meat for dinner or a BBQ because its simply too hot to turn on a kitchen appliance inside the house. Summer in my part of the world means dry heat , so when you walk outside all the air gets sucked out of your lungs and your skin turns into a real life shrinky dink. Summer to me is the bliss of dashing from an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned house. Summer to me is hibernating for approximately three months with all the windows, doors and curtains closed while the weather does its annual thing.  I think I've been left with some genetic imprint from my British ancestors where my brain screams "It's too hot-make it stop". 

We've had days and days over the 100F mark in the last few weeks , and yesterday topped the mercury at 41C. Last week we had a delightful day of 45 C.  The government doesn't want us to know how hot it really gets and Fahrenheit sounds twice as hot so we use Celsius measurements here as if that somehow changes the temperature to something manageable and less like to bake your brain in your skull.       

So my favourite thing today is the fabulous temperature drop we've had overnight which means today is only going to be 27C/80F with a 10% chance of showers.  I woke to gentle breezes and light sun and the thought that I can actually be outside without risking being burned into a something crisp and crunchy within 3 minutes. It's not going to last so I'm going to enjoy it while I can. 

What's your favourite thing this week?