1er Thermidor

Today, 19 July would be 1er Thermidor in the French Revolutionary calendar, demonstrating that what ever they knew about the triumph of reason they missed out completely on not being northern hemisphere centric.

Especially this year when we've had a run of freezing cold weather in Canberra, ever since the end of June, with freezing nights well below zero and ice sitting on the cars until 10.30 in the morning.

In fact it's been so cold we've been lighting the wood stove in the living room every night - something we normally only do at the weekends or if we have people over. We've gone through so much wood I had to get another half tonne of firewood delivered, which itself was a minor drama excellently executed - instead of the usual scenario where they turn up with a half tonne of would in a beat up truck and dump it on the nature strip, this time they had a crane truck and the wood in one of these bags gravel is delivered in and they winched it over and next to the woodshed, which while it still meant stacking the wood, did mean the wheelbarrow part of the exercise could be comfortably skipped.

Still on the plus side we had a awful day of sleety rain in the middle of last week which fell as snow on the mountains - there's more rain forecast next week and if it falls as snow we might well get to go skiing, which is a dramatic change from the completely snowless Kiandra of a couple of weeks ago....