I was driving to work on Wednesday and listening to the breakfast show on Radio National. There was much consternation about the weather conditions in South Australia.  Extremely hot, extremely windy and extreme fire danger, rising to catastrophic in some parts of the state.

You can keep that, I thought, as I turned into the car park.

It is true that, on the whole, our weather comes from the direction of South Australia.  Before weather forecasting got more accurate computers and modelling, if you wanted to know what the weather was going to be like in Melbourne tomorrow you would look and see what it was doing in Adelaide today. It's not an absolute given, but it's close enough.

It was therefore unsurprising that for Thursday, parts of Victoria were graded as Code Red for fire danger (the equivalent of Catastrophic in other states) and there was a statewide total fire ban.

We were not in any of the Code Red parts of the state (if we had been I would have put Jim, Rupert and Hugo in the car on Wednesday evening and gone elsewhere). But we did have very strong, swirly, gusty wind.  By lunchtime it was about 38d. We had the air conditioning on in the lounge room to keep the dogs cool, plus we had loads of containers filled with water both in and outside the house - for the dogs and the birds and anything else that was thirsty.

There were no fires close to us, although it was hard to tell what the band of cloud/smoke/mist/mirk/whatever which was heading towards us from the west was.  It turned out it was cloud and dust. It didn't bring any rain, but it did bring a cool change.  At 1pm the temperature was 38d and the wind was from the north.By 2:30 it was 20d and the wind was from the south west.  By 4pm it was 15d and when we went to bed it was around 10d.

When I got up yesterday morning I gave serious consideration to putting the heating on!!  I didn't but it definitely was not very warm. My poor summer vegetable seedlings, some of which I have just planted out, are very confused.

Jim, Rupert and I were in the dining room on Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the cool change went through.  Hugo was sleeping in the lounge room.  Suddenly he came belting down the hallway and rushed out into the side garden barking loudly.  This woke Rupert up who also ran outside to help with whatever it was.  I went down to the front garden and went out to see what was going on.  All I could see was a rubbish bin that had blown over.  I wouldn't have thought that that would upset Hugo quite so much, but I picked it up and pushed it against the wall.

Later in the afternoon I heard a commotion in the lounge room.  Lindsey had returned home and was yelling at us to close the kitchen door. Hugo was barking.  Rupert, Jim and I went to find out why. And there was a young fox on the front lawn, paying no attention at all to Hugo (and now Rupert) barking at it.  It ambled off once it noticed that there were now also three humans watching it through the window.  Jim has seen it again since.  I wonder if it was the fox that had Hugo so exercised earlier in the afternoon. I thought his reaction was a bit extreme for a blown over rubbish bin!

Off to Mount Martha later this morning.  Fortunately most of the bits of trees that blew around on Thursday have been cleared away and the weather conditions are pleasant and mild. Lindsey says it was HORRIBLE driving back to Ballarat on Thursday. Much nicer today.