Life in summer
I know I was resisting it to begin with, but I’m really liking the new wordpress update. It’s quite a bit different to the previous updates, so I can accept that they were justified in offering it so soon after the last one. However, i still maintain that fewer updates with increased functionality and useability in each one is better than hundreds of small updates with small changes that you might hardly notice.
Tonight I spent a while cleaning out our pantry. There were a fair few things that needed to be thrown out, and there was a sticky layer of soy sauce on one of the shelves (I’m still wondering how that happened. The bottle is thick glass, no cracks, not knocked over…) that had to be scrubbed at for a few minutes before it finally admitted defeat and released its hold on the laminate. I felt a sense of satisfaction once the job was done, and the shelves do look much more orderly, but I’ve got a headache throbbing behind my temples now and a queasy feeling in my stomach. I’m pretty sure it is all to do with the heat plaguing us at the moment.
Annoyingly, the airconditioner in our living area decided that it would choose today to stop de-humidifying the air. The result of this is somewhat slightly cooler, though still humid air being recylced back out through the airconditioning unit. The thing that really affects me in summer here is not so much the heat, though that is bad enough in itself, but the humidity. It’s the humidity that makes the air soupy and thick. It causes bread to mould up the day after you buy it, unless you put it in the fridge. Actually, it causes a whole lot of things to mould up in a couple of days, even a bag of lemons we had sitting on the bench. They weren’t old by any stretch of the imagination! I, for some reason, thought it might be okay to keep lemons out of the fridge.
Living in Australia in summer makes everything feel ridiculous. What I mean is, everyday things that you do every day. Things like going to work, wearing closed-in shoes, drinking coffee when it’s warm/hot, wearing business clothes… I guess the main thing that’s frustrating is the clothing thing. I feel like wearing a summer dress and haviainas, when instead I have to wear something that won’t look too out-of-place in the office. I live in fear of the airconditioner at work breaking down. When I worked at Suncorp, the airconditioner broke on one of the hottest days that year. Of course, being in a new multi-storey building meant that there was no other way to get fresh air flowing through the floor. The temperature went up to over 40 degrees celsius and still management wouldn’t let people leave. I left anyway. I don’t cope with the heat.
Australia is hot and humid. A vast majority of the country is tropical or subtropical, and even the parts of the country that are classed as having a mediterranean climate (are you KIDDING? ) can still look forward to a few days of 40+ degrees celsius each summer. I know that we were colonised by people from a colder climate, but you would think that after a few generations we’d have learnt to adapt our lifestyles accordingly. I admit that we do live differently to people in the UK, but we seem just to have chosen to do so in the dumbest possible ways. For example: spending hours and hours of our spare time in the sun.
People from other countries seem to see us as fairly easy-going, laidback, lackadaisical characters. I’m not disputing that this is likely true, in relative terms. I think the reason for this stereotype is more because most of the time it’s too frickin hot to really have the energry to be anything but laidback. Taking an interest and caring about things uses energy, and that generates heat, and oh god if I add any more to the heat that’s currently pressing in around me I will spontaneously combust.
Is it still spontaneous if you expect it to happen?
So anyway, hopefully we will get our other airconditioner fixed tomorrow. Right now, I am cocooned in the comfortable and cool embrace of artificially chilled and de-humidified air (our airconditioner in the bedroom works, thankfully). When I step out of this room, it feels like stepping into a bathroom where someone has left the hot water running without the exhaust fan on.
Yuck.