Happy New 2008

Happy New Year to you all. Hope you all had a lovely Chrsitmas. It goes without saying that we missed you all dearly, but fortunately we were unable to dwell on this issue as it was 45 degrees on Christmas Day and Boxing Day was 46. That's centigrade, making Perth officially the hottest place on the planet at that time! Having only experienced 42 degrees before, that little bit extra does make a difference, believe me. Horrific, it even hurt to breathe. But we had to join in with tradition, so on Christmas morning after opening our prezzies, we headed to the beach wth our new friends (see, we can do it) Orla & Lucy for champagne & strawberries. Yum. At 9:30am it was already packed, so everybody could bag some shade and set their picnics out. I was the Designated Driver, an honour which was to prove fairly short-lived. So Andy got quite drunk. By 10am he was leaping into the sea as if he weren't scared of cold water and frolicking with strangers wearing santa hats.



After a few hours of chilling out and reading my Harold Shipman biography (a festive treat!), we headed over to another friends house for a Barbie. Hilary & Matthew are very nice people because they have lived in Brighton. They have just bought a lovley house, but in keeping with the rest of Aussie society, it's in the middle of nowhere and getting there involves some planning. Especially since I'd ditched the whole driving idea by now and decided I needed wine to survive the heat. So we walked to the station and then had to walk to their house from the station. That's a 30 minute total walk in 45 degrees with a drunken husband who kept laughing at me for being so hot and bothered. After passing several skeletons along the side of the road, we got there absolutely dying. I collapsed with a bottle of wine and two rather perky Burmese cats, while the boys actually went OUTSIDE to BBQ! By this point, the outside temperature had reached 47 degrees and with everybody caning the A/C across the city, several hundreds of homes had a power cut and were without electricity for a few hours. Can you imagine?!?!



Boxing day we knew was going to be just as bad, so we headed for the beach and just stayed there all day. Andy isn't one for sitting in the shade, so we just kept running into the sea every 20 minutes to cool off. It's probably the best place to be when it's that hot as at least there is a breeze, which the locals call the Freemantle Doctor. Our Christmas prezzie to ourselves was our car. I was so excited to finally have a means to go exploring, as so far we've only been away for the day once since we arrived here 3 months ago.







So I let Andy have sole control over the project and off he went. He decided to buy a little Dihatsu Charade, which turns out to be an apt name for the thing. He bought it for $2,000 (our last $2,000) from a 'very trustworthy' doctor who was returning to Sri Lanka after working here for a while. We had it a week and it seemed fine running about town- until we took it on a longer venture. We were heading South to Cape Naturaliste and were almost at Bunbury when I said "I can smell something funny." At about the same time Andy said "Shit, the temperature gauge is on red!" and about now, we saw smoke and steam billowing from the bonnet. As we pulled over onto the snake-infested roadside, we could actually hear the water boiling in the radiator. I truly believed the thing was about to explode and knew instantly we had made a grave error. I swear you could even see spiders sat in their humongous webs abut 20 metres away, just waiting for something like this to happen. Andy, the eternal optomist said we should just wait until it cooled down. Me, knowing we were doomed, said we should just call the RAC and be done with it. It was at this point I realised Andy had used the last of our drinking water to fill up the radiator. I mean, what sort of madness leads to such foolishness! Has he not listened to a word Bear Grills has said?



Several rows and about an hour later, it seems evident that the car isn't cooling down, so we call the RAC man. An old lady who is quite clearly a serial killer stops and gives us some water. Obviously the water was poisonous, so I only had a sip and then the RAC arrives and says he can either tow us back to Perth at $3.5/km or, we can try to get back ourselves, which in his opinion, he seriously doubted we could manage. So of course I am persuaded to try drivng back. We stop every half hour to top op the cooling fluid and miraculously we make it back home in one piece. Five hours later and all we have seen is the kangaroo sculpure at Mandurah station. My optimism is shattered and Andy has to take me to see Ratatouille at the open-air cinema to calm me down. It worked temporarily, but now we are waiting for the car to be fixed. The head gasket has blown and apparently the cylinder has a big crack down it which had been subjected to a temporary welding job, so it turns out the good doctor may have been pulling a fast one after all. On the plus side, my husband now has muscles.