I don’t even know where to begin today. It’s been a dreadful day so far, and it’s probably going to get worse overnight. We’ve had record breaking heat over much of south-eastern Australia today. It’s nearly 10pm where I live and it’s still 34°C outside. At Penrith, a Sydney suburb where I have family living, it reached 48.9°C (120°F) today, smashing the old record high temperature within the Sydney boundary by 1.6 degrees.
A cool change has been moving up the south coast and is expected to hit Sydney around midnight. But that also brings strong winds, which could be even worse for the huge fires burning all over the place.
So far today we only have preliminary news reports indicating some indeterminate number of buildings destroyed. We won’t know until the sun rises tomorrow what sort of numbers we’re looking at. Or how many people may have gone missing or been killed.
Honestly, it’s getting exhausting just following the news day after day, even from the safety of my inner city home. People I know have been evacuated or had their homes under imminent danger of being destroyed. It’s hard to do anything else.
I did manage to make one new Darths & Droids strip today, but that’s about it, in between a bit of random homekeeping stuff, and going out with my wife and Scully for dinner. We sat at an outdoor table at a restaurant (because of Scully), watching the blood red sun set through the smoky sky. Everyone else was inside in the air conditioning. We were just sitting there, relaxing, and it was so hot that sweat was dripping and rolling down my body, even after the sun had gone down.
Tomorrow should be cooler, and hopefully there will be some relief from the fires, until the cycle builds up to another stinking hot day. It’s still early in the summer.
New content today: