New Year

It’s a new year or at least it is in this blog. I’ve been too silent lately but I’m hoping to change that. I still have a post to write about going to Brisbane in November so that might be one of the next posts I write.

We’re just about at the end of summer now with autumn officially starting on March 1st. Of course it’s still pretty warm here. Unlike much of Australia, we didn’t have so many nasty fires around the Perth area. There was a big one in December but nothing of major note since then. We’ve been quite lucky in that respect. We did have some really hot weather in early December but temperatures this summer were mostly mild to moderate compared to years past. That makes three summer where it’s not been all that terrible.

What has been harsher is the humidity. When we first got our air conditioning back in 2002 or 2003, it worked really well here as the heat was mostly dry and only a few days in the summer caused it to work poorly for us. It’s an evaporative system which had been typical here but the number of humid days is getting a lot higher and so we end up having an ineffective cooling system. We have other issues with the current system we have so have ideas of changing it in the next year or two. I think it’s quite possible we may switch to a different type of system next time.

This week has been a stormy one and we’ve had a lot of rain over the few days. It started on Monday although we didn’t get rain where we live. I’d been expecting rain so avoided watering plants but then we didn’t get any. I finally watered plants on Tuesday morning and sure enough we had a big amount of rain dumped on us that afternoon. Well I think it was a big amount since I wasn’t home when it happened. It definitely was a dumping where the Scientist and I were. The storm cell seemed to weaken a bit before it got here so I think it was just a lot of rain and storminess but nothing too close.

Today the sun has come back out and it’s mostly big fluffy clouds although it’s still possible we’ll get more rain. After that it’s supposed to be dry for at least a few days.

Oh and the other thing that we’ve had trouble with here are the hot nights. Every night lately has been above 20C which is pretty unusual. especially when the daytime temperatures haven’t been super high.