Blue Mountains Burning

There has been a bit of wild weather the last couple weeks: snow on the East coast from Victoria all the way up into Queensland. It is the start of bushfire season, so large areas of forest have been burning in New South Wales (between Queensland and Victoria). Giant icebergs have been sighted about 80 km off the coast of New Zealand, but I believe they melted before they hit land. To put it into perspective, the icebergs would have come from Antarctica, which is at least a couple thousand km away. For whatever reason they sent a crew out on helicopter and they jumped out onto this floating, melting and cracking iceberg so that they could, I dunno, tromp around on it and look like adventurous Kiwis.

The weirdest environment I've experienced so far was the other Wednesday when I walked out of my office to wait for my shuttle ride home. It was about 38ºC (100ºF) and a strange smell was in the air. It smelled like a really strong campfire and sure enough that is what it was. The Blue Mountains just to the west of Sydney had gone up in a blaze. This is the closest I have ever been to a forest fire, and with the strong smell, heat, humidity and haze I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I didn't know how near or far it was from me either; coulda been 5 miles or 50 miles. So I got the idea that I was right at the edge of the fire (one can see the Blue Mountains for the rooftops) because of the conditions above. 25 minutes later when I got home, the temperature had dropped 20-25ºF and the sunset was amazing that night. What an odd place this is.