Hot and grumpy in the worlds driest continent

I was downstairs yesterday preparing the brick walls, filling in the holes and gaps then painting on top. Well big surprise, your Mum doesn’t like the colour! Is it all women that are like this? Are you like this? Its infuriating when all decisions are second guessed.

Its really hot at the moment and that does not help. Awful weather, I would be happier in a place where it never went higher than mid 20's. Its really hard to work out if we really are in dire straights in Australia or not. The dry spell we are going through these last few years could be part of a bigger cycle and maybe in a few years the weather patterns will change again. It could also be what we are doing to the planet with carbon emissions and the like. I do talk about moving to a place where water will not be an issue. I wonder what its like for you now. We are already on the driest continent on Earth and up until a few years ago you weren't allowed to add water tanks to your residential home. That is how reactionary we are as a society right now. But the media has jumped on the environment bandwagon now which is a good thing. Media is the new religion so whatever it says goes. If the taste makers decide that we should all be wearing hats with stuffed animals on them then in a year there would be no pets left unstuffed. Being water wise is now a popular thing to do. In fact not long ago a guy was shot and killed by his neighbor for watering excessively when he shouldn’t. The things making people scared right now are the weather and terrorists. When I was young it was the threat of nuclear war before Russia crumbled as a superpower. Environmental disasters are occurring all over the world and nations like China and North Korea are becoming wealthier and more powerful. Each generation has its own fears and troubles. My grandparents generation had it the worst. Two world wars and a shocking recession. You should read Tim Winton's Cloudstreet if you haven't already. We are bringing you in to a time of transition. Its really not certain what is coming. There is a part of me that is fearful of how quickly China is growing, we are essentially unprotected down here. The only reason we would be left alone is because we are not close to anything significant. But we are abundant in natural resources and we would be paradise to the average Chinese farmer etc. John Marsdens series is not that far fetched.

I am in a grumpy short tempered mood today it seems. I need to acclimatise to the heat. One of my philosophies is that nothing can make you feel anything unless you want it to. Now the weather is not making me feel moody, I'm allowing the weather to make me moody. Its an indulgence really but that’s ok sometimes. Let off some steam as it where.

Every time I write in this there is a voice in the back of my head that says "how is she possible going to read 18 years worth of this, are you insane?". Then another voice sounds out from deep down telling me that this is an important task. It may be that future generations of my family read this or it may be that it only helps me work out my feelings and thoughts. Either way I am going to continue writing.

Fact of the day -
The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Results were - Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a sadistic few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.
In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.