ajft

The power finally came back almost twelve hours to the minute after yesterday's outage. Four-fifteem a.m. and every clock started beeping and the radio started blaring, I think I'd only been asleep for a little over an hour in the 30°C night.

There was a diesel generator thumping away all night at the end of the street powering some important part of the railway at Oakleigh station. A couple of minutes after the power came on and we'd reset the alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep, the fire brigade all came charging down the street with lights ablaze and sirens on! I think someone may have forgotton to unplug the generator when the mains came back on.

Needless to say, Wednesday the 17th is a very slow, quiet day as I try to make it through the working hours in my new stuffy, airless office.

Revisited... 2007-Jan-20

We bumped into a contractor on Saturday morning, locking up the gates onto the tracks as he was clearing up. Seems that the mysterious brick windowless building at the end of the platform contains a compressor and some 1960s era electrical equipment which is all part of the rail-signalling system. The power outage on Tuesay damaged it and they had to run a spare compressor all night to keep the points working — not a generator as I'd thought. When the power came back it ran for almost a day, but then it blew up and caused a blackout. Of course there are no parts available for a roomful of 1968 electrical equipment, but he'd repaired it and it should keep running until the next time it breaks down!

Six p.m. and all is strangely quiet — very, very quiet. The power failed at about four thirty and we thought it was just the building, or maybe the campus... then a cow-orker heard from his kids that there was no power at Oakleigh, then from others that the effects were more widespread. A forty degree day, all the air-conditioners in Melbourne thundering away and then bushfires damaged the main interstate transmission lines and it all went dark.

Left work at half-past five and slid past the traffic jam in Clayton road, literally sliding in the melted tar, all sticky and slippery. Every second motorist in the jam was illegally on the phone to their loved ones. Then half-way up North road my lack of hubris bit me on the bum as I ran over a nail and had it go blunt-end-first through my back tire. Changing a tube in 40°C heat at the side of a busy road is no fun.

Home at six and it is silent, 40°C outside, 30°C inside. All the clocks are off, all the whirrs and whines and motors are silent.

Bushfires are raging across Victoria and the forecast for the weekend is two days of high thirty temperatures and strong winds. Woke this morning to stiffling heat, thick smoke filling the air and a dull orange sun shining down. Visibility is down to a couple of kilometres and there's no incentive to go outside and do anything at all. This is in the city, 150km from the fires, it must be terrible out there fighting them.

The one thing I did was try to fix a few too many punctures in too many inner tubes. Last night on the way home I felt the back tire go down a suburb from home — a toss up whether to change the tube or catch the train, since I was almost at Murrumbeena station. I chose to swap the tube, then watched in frustration as my spare that I've been carrying around for the last few months went down as fast as I pumped up. Of course the train went past while I did this, at a frustrating distance of “if I'd not tried to change tubes I could have caught that...”

This morning I patched the first of the tubes, one down, then out to the bike to get the other one back off the wheel. While I was there I saw that the mountain bike had a flat front tyre as well! It certainly hadn't when I put it away a couple of weeks ago. Later in the day I put a patched tube back into the road bike wheel and watched half an hour later as it went down again — another pin hole in a different place in the tube! Another tube swap and another tyre pumped up. The mountain bike tube didn't seem to have a leak anywhere in it, so I just shrugged and fiddled with the valve, pumped it up and hoped I don't have to do this too often.

Gradually creeping up to 28°C inside, the thermometer sensor hanging out the lounge room window says its 44.9°C outside on the western side of the house! Back to the couch to sit and read and drink cold drinks.

Whoa, we're definitely getting hot around here. The temperature is 35°C and still only in October, we're in for a very hot summer.

Hot, damn hot... as it says in the classics. Not just hot either, gusty, blustery dry and dusty northerly winds as well, the kind of winds that blast a cyclist back and forth across there-quarters of a lane while filling his eyes with grit. The kind of wind that for the second day in a row rips a great branch off the Callistemon in the front garden. I guess it solves the dilemma of how we prune it, and how much we remove!