It's gonna' pop through any day now - in fact today looks like a spring day. I must be careful what I wish for, though.

We've spent the last few months doing everything we could to stay warm. Sometime in the next three weeks or so we'll be suddenly faced with the task of keeping cool from the sweltering heat. We don't yet have air conditioning. I'm living at approximately the same latitude as Los Angeles.

Parts of Queensland are approximately the same latitude as Mexico City. Sydney would lie around Tijuana - and Melbourne on the southern coast would be somewhere around S.F. if the world were flipped. As I've explained before, I'm actually at an altitude more like Albuquerque, even though the 'LA weather' is only about ten minutes away, over the edge of the nearby continental cliff.

The birds are getting much more noisy in the morning. And these aren't little chirp, chirp songbirds. These guys are big and loud. The whip birds, the kookaburras, the r2d2 birds. It's impossible to sleep in on a weekend because of all the avian racket outside the window. They put the American rooster to shame (though there are a few of those around as well).