Here at Melbourne, the weather is unpredictable in the most predictable ways. Things will never turn out exactly how you want them too, and you'll never guess exactly how the weather is going to be in the afternoon, much less in the coming week.
We've had a surprisingly pleasant summer so far, very different to the heatwaves of recent years. This has lead to a certain dread on my part: when summer kicks in, I keep on thinking, it will really kick in with a vengeance. Endless days and nights of unrelenting forty degree temperatures, days when you can't think of anything but the heat.
The result: I've become an obsessive reader of the website http://www.bom.gov.au/, and related weather updates. Which has lead to my current dilemma, my current whether about the weather, if you like...
At bom.gov.au, the news is hideous. They say it's going to be a virtual INFERNO tomorrow: 37 degrees celsius.
BUT! At Weather.com, they say it's going to be a veritable doddle, a walk in the park, an almost-but-not-quite-Antarctica. Twenty nine degrees celsius, if that.
I just don't know whether to believe the guys at weather.com, or the chaps at bom.gov.au.
If it's going to be a pleasant twenty nine, then maybe I should choose to believe bom.gov.au, and be pleasantly surprised by the mildness and clemency of the weather at this time of year. Then again, if I believe what they say at weather.com, I could be happily unsurprised by the way the day turns out.
And what if it turns out to be a BOILING thirty seven degrees? I could still choose to believe in bom.gov.au, and have the grim satisfaction of being proved correct. If I believed in the predictions of weather.com, on the other hand, I'd be pretty ticked off at the way the day turned out.
What to believe? Who to listen to? I Just. Don't. Know.
Nice whether we're having lately...
UPDATE! - Then again, I would be rather bucked up to be grimly satisfied about being correct about the unpleasantness of the weather. Grim satisfaction is so satisfyingly grim, don't you think?
You'd get along well with my sister, she's quite addicted to the BoM website. Of course, since she's about to deal with fairly major flooding it might be more than just paranoia on her part.
ReplyDeleteYes, I don't have that excuse.
ReplyDeleteNot only do I talk about the weather, but I read the weather website and BLOG about it. I'm a sad case.
It's a preoccupation we all share...
ReplyDeleteAnd the funny thing is, by tomorrow you'll have forgotten whether they were right or wrong, and only be wondering about the next day.
Moo!
18 degrees! It's only 18 degrees! (And 8:24am.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, this:
ReplyDeleteWeather channel accused of pro-weather bias.
Shocking!
32 degrees. And it's 1pm. Adelaide's already up to 39, so I'm counting my blessings.
ReplyDeleteI used to have an email pen-pal in Melbourne (I lost her. Terribly careless of me, wasn't it?)
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, she wrote to me almost daly, and her emails were short but almost all started with something along the lines of "It's 18 degrees Celsius, fine but a bit cloudy here ..." and then she would tell me a few lines about her life and sign off.
It wasn't the most stimulating chat session I was having ever, so eventually I tried to hint that I didn't realy need to get Melborneon weather updates every day, it wan't my favourite topic of convo.
She wrote back to me:
"What? You are not interesting in the weather?"
I wrote back to explain that actually, I was interesting, and interesting in all sorts of weather, I just wasn't very interested in it.
I don't know if she quite got it but our pen-pal-ship declined quite a bit after that.
Conversations with my ex-flatmate, a native Melbournean, were sometimes like that - he'd usually open by asking what the weather was going to be like today or tomorrow, and so I started reading the weather updates in the paper for conversation starters: "H B___ The weather's going to be fine, a couple of showers developing, with maybe the chance of a thunderstorm if you're going up St Kilda way, clearing later in the evening. Like a beer?"
ReplyDeleteThirty three degrees and climbing. Curses! Grim satisfaction grimly kicking in!
ReplyDelete33 degrees. And it usually peaks around 4:30 in midsummer.
ReplyDeleteSorry - it's the heat. I meant to say it's 36 degrees.
ReplyDeleteI could keep having this conversation all day.
37! Vindication for bom.com.au
ReplyDeleteAh, that reminds me, must check if Queensland is still whole or if it's become a series of really crap islands.
ReplyDelete