It was my intention to run about 30km yesterday morning, most on bush tracks. I woke up at a little after 5:30am to find Sydney had turned a weird orange-grey-red colour. It was somewhat reminiscent of the way movies portray Mars in its inhabited future. It was very odd. A neighbour was in her garden gazing at what should have been a clear dawn sky. The conclusion we both jumped to was that the mother-of-all-bushfires had broken out. Only neither of us could smell burning. Dust storm. Being stupid I started running towards Roseville in case there were fires that I may be able to get some blurry pictures of. I'd pretty much decided I'd not run a long way as I do have some respect for my lungs. Sal, who called when I was only a couple of km from home showed far more respect for my lungs and, although she did not phrase it quite like this the message was a clear "stop being suck a fucking moron and get home." I did just that.In a slight defence of my stupidity, I had been keeping an eye on the cars that I passed and at that time they did not have much dust coating them. Later there was a shit load of dust over everything, so I was glad to have turned and walked - not run - back home. Had I got further from home I'd be coughing my lungs up until christmas.
It was damn cool to be out and about yesterday morning. Willoughby was - I kid you not - sepia. In places the sky was a proper red, but it was mainly a dull grey-red-brown that managed to flatten all other colour. It was sepia. I thought maybe I'd woken up in a 1930s photograph. It was bloody windy too. So they grey trees where swaying violently against a brown-grey sky and slow driving cars with headlights on were crawling through a warm, dusty fog.
If anything it was more weird when I got home. Being outside I was part of a sepia world. When I got home and looked out of our windows it was surreal. The window frames were a brightish white and things inside the hosue had most of their usual colour but the view through the windows was, well, wrong. It was as if a series of sepia - are you getting the sepia thing yet? - pictures had been stuck against the window. Odd.
Scour the internet for piccies and videos of yesterday morning. There are some way cool shots. It was pretty difficult to take a pic that wasn't way cool yesterday. I know, I tried.
Sal gave me less of a beratting than I deserved and we then loaded AJ into the car and headed out to get some breakfast. The redness was dropping in favour of a blanket of grey and an increasing amount of dust over everything. Car windows closed, no aircon sucking air from outside. We headed for a cafe in Wollsencraft that has a bit of a view - not much, but a bit - usually. Yesterday it had no view.
Coffee break. The cafe, one of those I should commit to memory the name of, has a small and varied coffee menu. Knowing bugger all about coffee I picked my bean using green-principled-geography. PNG beans have the shortest distance to travel from tree to mug and therefore do least environmental damage. No idea if that is true, but it seemed as good a basis for decision as any. Sal took a different tack; she asked the waitress her favourite and went Brazillian (snicker.) We swapped mugs almost immediately; Brazil packed a wallop compared to the mellowness of PNG.
Breakfast done - AJ snacked on a banana, French toast for Sal and "the lot" omlette for me - it was time to head to Chatswood where I was to become an Australian citizen.
More on than later, things to do, people to see, gotta go.
