By now, everyone’s heard about the dust storm. Apparently, this sort of thing never happens - I saw a quote in the news that one guy said he saw one about 40 years ago in Adelaide, and my husband said he had never seen or heard of this happening before. So that should give you an idea of how confused we were when we woke up and the air was bright orange.
T woke me up at 6am and said “Look outside, it looks weird.” I glanced up at the window and said, “It’s just the sunrise.” He said, “No, get up and look.” It looked like this:
It doesn't help that we live across the street from a creepy church.
We couldn’t imagine what it was. I thought that it was the sunrise filtering through a heavy fog, even though that didn’t seem plausible. T opened the window to take pictures, and after a minute we were like, “Hm, it smells like chalk.” Now that we know what it was, it seems really obvious, but we couldn’t imagine why an orange fog would smell like chalk, so he went downstairs to Google what was happening, and that’s when we found out and decided to close the windows right back up.
So it’s spring, and our bathroom window is permanently jammed open, and there are no screens on the windows in our apartment, here in Australia.
The other day I came home from class to find this guy perched on the chair in our bathroom:
Furrier in person.
You can probably tell by the chair, but he was several inches across. I thought a few things:
- I wonder if this is the most poisonous spider in the world, which lives exclusively in the Sydney region and I have no idea what it looks like?
- How close can I get to take a picture before it jumps on me?
- This spider is only the most obvious giant spider in the bathroom.
He was looking pretty stationary, so I decided to go downstairs and hope that he didn’t migrate to the bedroom or anything. I don’t like to kill things that are bigger than a quarter if I can help it, because I don’t like to experience the crunch and squish. So I waited for T to come home, and he didn’t want to kill it either because it was too fuzzy and he felt bad for it, so he put it in a Tupperware and released it into the wilds of Glebe. I asked him, “Do you think that was a huntsman?” (giant but harmless house spiders of Australia) and he said, “No, it was way too small.” We decided that it might have been a baby huntsman, since it’s spring and all.
Here, by the way, is a picture of a huntsman:
Yeah, we definitely need to move house before summer gets into full swing, because now that thing is out there and it knows how to get back in.
So it’s fall now in Australia, and you can definitely tell that it is–before I came here I was worried that the seasons would be practically non-existant. (By the way, I never realized that fall is a particularly American term until I came here and everyone started saying things like “So it’s so-called ‘fall,’ now, huh?”) I have a sneaking suspicion that fall is just going to be really long and eventually turn into spring, since it’s already towards the end of May and it’s still not that chilly. During the day, when the sun is out, it is actually hot. But, there are about three trees in Sydney that have actually changed color and dropped their leaves, so that makes me happy.
Tree on our street
But it is definitely weird to be going into fall as I know that everyone back home is getting ready for Memorial Day. Fall/winter seems sort of boring and anticlimactic here, since there are no real holidays that take place during those months. I kind of suspect that the real reason I like those seasons so much is because of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. (Although I guess the real bummer of having those holidays actually come around when it’s spring/summer and, in some cases, no one else is celebrating them is yet to come.) Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re doing this season first, because I like fall better than I like spring and yet I still find myself feeling sad or weird when I realize what season it is in the Northern Hemisphere. So I’m glad I get to deal with the concept before it’s the other way around.
So basically, I still manage to keep forgetting what month it is and keep trying really hard not to miss any important birthdays or Mothers’/Fathers’ Days. Actually, not having a job yet, so no set schedule, I usually barely know what day of the week it is. Where are we again? Oh, right, Australia.
