Part Twenty-three: Weather and all that STUFF

Well, here I am, writing this in the nice new year of 2014, mid-January, and once again I pose the question: WHAT WET SEASON? But I guess that I must back-track and elaborate on notes I made in November and December last year in hopeful anticipation of the coming WET.
"This build-up time, before the wet season fully descends on us, seems different from last year, the previous year, and even the last dozen or so years. It seems more like the pre-monsoonal times we experienced 30 or 40 years ago. The air is inert and heavy with moisture. After midday the humidity rises alarmingly and the indoor temperature gauge reads 34.9?, and you feel you could slice it with a knife.

"This rising, heated wetness hovers sluggishly in the absolute stillness and is like a solid entity, filling all available space. Rather like a guest who has outstayed his welcome, pervading every nook and cranny in every room and pushing ponderously against eviction. The effort to find a cooler spot sends my small dog into paroxysms of loud panting as she tries hard to draw enough oxygen from the static atmosphere to sustain her life until the next climatic phase – hopefully beneficial and not too far away.

"Even our youthful resilience has evaporated over the last 40 odd years so all we can do now is reminisce about earlier times when movement and activity was so much easier for us. Even so, this quasi-return to real wet season conditions is welcome. Sudden thunderstorms and embryonic monsoon-type rains interspersed with hot, dry, sunny periods, with steam visibly rising from the heated bitumen, recall to many the frequent wet, windy, spontaneous rain squalls of yesteryear.

"Who knows – maybe the 'government rain' (4.15pm without fail, every working day, designed to drench all government workers at knock-off time of 4.21pm) will make a return as this wet season progresses."

As I continued reading the notes I had jotted down for the latter part of December, I decided that this was, perhaps, extreme wishful thinking. It was not quite the FULL ON wet season I had hoped for. Even so, periodic drizzly rains, overcast skies and distant thunder rolls, with the odd dry lightning storms appearing just tempting us to believe that the monsoons had arrived, were a notable feature at this time. My wee dog doing double duty as a thunderstorm barometer – hearing far-off thunder long before I could – would give me early warning to clear the clothes line if I wanted to avoid a wet re-wash.

Continuing last year's notes......"Nearing Christmas, the intermittent showers had rinsed the dry season's dust from roofs and leaves; the accumulated oil and rubber had been sluiced from the road surfaces, and a tinge of anticipation drifted almost imperceptibly in the air. The brilliant orange-flowered poincianas and African tulips, the yellow peltophorums, the purple and pink pride of India trees and the many coloured and white temple frangipanis have slowly shed their blossoms, often creating colourful carpets at their bases. Rapidly replacing the fallen petals was a new intensity of glossy green leaves; but this evidence of annual regrowth has been somewhat tempered by the forecast of an approaching low and the expectation of a wet and windy Christmas Day.

"And then came the media's constant use of those should-be-forbidden words (to us 'oldies' anyhow): Cyclone Tracy! It is almost forty years since Tracy wrecked Darwin, yet every year at this time, they manage to dredge up someone else to tell how they happily survived the 'night of terror' crouching under a bed with a bottle of rum or some such. When will the media (collectively) realise that most of Tracy's victims would prefer NOT to be reminded of that traumatic night, and just have a 'bad-memory-free' time at Christmas? I vote for NO MORE TRACY STORIES! Maybe we should register a new political party named NMTS."

Anyhow, that is my rant for 2013, and now a few words about January. After Christmas, the rain petered out and we were once again left with a faux wet season. The temperature climbed even higher; the humidity reached dizzying heights, and we all cursed a parallel rise in PowerWater costs as we perforce had to turn on our air conditioning during the daytime solely for survival. It was horribly hot and even the birds reacted to this rise, rise, rise with no rain relief in sight.

The bar-shouldered doves slouched around the yard almost too hot and lethargic to move. The crimson finches, prolific visitors to my patio bird feeder prior to Christmas, ceased to come, fewer peewees were to be seen and the ibis disappeared totally, searching elsewhere for food and water. And in the second week along comes 'will-he-or-won't-he' Dylan, the pretend cyclone. Poor Dylan – prematurely named and categorised, the over-excited meteorologists soon reclassified and downgraded his description to a 'low', a 'depression', a 'trough' and other belittling words. Dylan still managed to masquerade as a 'what could happen' warning for the cyclone season, but couldn't quite get up enough steam to do any real damage. But at the very least, he dumped some much-needed rain and brought cooler conditions.

Enough of my cynicism for now, though. I hope you all had great Christmas and New Year festivities. Next month will be an update on bird news, and I'll try to forget the weather aspect.