Icy Icy Baby

Thursday 20th I woke to one of the coldest mornings in a while, here in our temperate location on Australia’s Bass Coast. I mean – the weatherfolk had been predicting 2C overnight with frost risk and this is considered cold here. People that head for Perisher and the snowfields up around there, they have snow clothing and are sort of used to it, and I’m told that a lot of people actually liver there by choice. Weird…

Not me. I escaped a temperate climate in Austria where I remember just two winters being in the snow, once with my grandfather hauling me along on a little sled, and once stomping along beside the whole family group. My entire life from age five onwards turned to Persian Gulf, Bahrain Island 32C 80%RH followed by Bombay (yep it was still called that back then) India and then Fremantle, several wheatbelt towns, and the the Pilbara region of Western Australia where any temperature below 15C was cause for jackets and jumpers.

So on the 20th, I hopped into the car at 8:30 to head up into the low hills to pick up raw pet meat for our cats. Oh yes, they get spoilt, why do you ask? Raw kangaroo mince every evening, half a tin of catfood almost every morning – depending how much of the ‘roo mince they ate – and cat biscuits (kitty kibble) during the day.

That’s why we have two very large tuxedo bois without any spare ounces and a large grey fluffy older gentleman that’s nudging up on their weight and condition. They have a fair exercise area and they use it to the full, with zoomies and wrestling and general mayhem.

Oh and before you worry – one of my duties when the large bag of mince gets home is to repack it into 1kg packs and then freeze to kill any parasites and their eggs. I’m not sure if the abattoir freezes it but I need to keep it frozen anyway, and making it into. portions I can just take out as needed for the next few days is just easy-peasy.

But I got sidetracked again. Curse you neurospiciness. I sat in the driver’s seat wondering why the air was so cold – looked at the windscreen – and it hit me that it was under a layer of frost, something unusual here. Opened the door again, reached around, and wiped a bit of it off the screen, so I took a picture, then hit the windscreen wipers and prayed that they weren’t stuck.

They weren’t, the windscreen cleared, so I drove off – and found that every south-facing slope and shaded piece of ground along the way, right up until 9:15, was white under frost. Sorry – I can’t stop along the 30km road that leads to the abattoir, as it’s traversed by trucks and tractors and goes through a lot of farming country and most of it’s barely two lanes with nowhere to pull over.

But this fills an hour and a bit of my time once every 4-6 weeks depending how hungry the boys have been, and in the winter, that’s always. I really enjoy the drive and have done it in rainstorms and pea soup fogs, but the best times are always when there’s bright sunlight and the feed in the paddocks is still green, and this day, there was the added bonus of seeing all those sheets of white draped over things.

Anyhow – just wanted to share the view through the windshield only a day before the winter solstice, and now I have, stay warm if you’re another antipodean, cool if you’re in that other hemisphere, and see you on the next post!

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