I wasn't ready for summer. It took me by suprise on a dirty back street, knocked me on the back of the head with a super heated, sharp sun glinting 45 and blew my brains out : pronto.

Annette and I had some vague plans for the day - weed the garden, have a bar-b-que, etc, etc but, after our mid morning walk, with sweat dribbling into unusual crevices and a lovely quick, cold shower my head still felt like it'd been coffined with twenty intraveneous valiums. We wandered around the house then into the shaded areas of the yard then back into the house then back into the yard (and so on...) until we both felt like puppies attached to a new owner. Finally my brain stem started working a bit and I said "We've got aircon in the car!! Let's use it and go to.... ummmm... errrrr... somewhere...".

And so we did : that cool, cool air flowed around our legs and up our shorts and over our chests and round our heads - delightfull. We'd decided to check out the Illawarra's only Big W (they had some cheap but nice looking CD racks and the store was airconditioned, of course - a bonus). So off on the southern freeway, past the Gong itself and onto the turnoff for Port Kembla.

The steelworks have a true industrial charm - don't get me wrong, it's horrible, smelly, hard work, polluting, etc, etc but as you swing along the main road past Cringilla (there's never been a better name for a place that overlooks a huge industrial site) the massive smoke stacks and simply enormous sheds and factories have a kind of beauty. That doesn't stop the rotten egg gas, though.

When Warrawong appears you realize that it's a truely horrible suburb that could have been lovely - set on the edge of Lake Illawarra it's close enough to the steel works so that you always know it's about and the Lake is almost always polluted as well. The street is chock ablock full of crap and the Westfield is like any other shopping centre but it's got a desperate look about it as well. We got the CD racks and I raked in about 10 crime novels that were going for $2 each and we got some other stuff as well - it's really, really cheap at Big W, Westfield, Warrawong, I'll tell ya but we were glad to get outta there and back to the car, if not to the hot, hot house.