Today we were supposed to continue with our run of heat and verily, it was far warmer than was comfortable. The top temperature at Observatory Hill in the city was 37.5, though at one point in the afternoon the apparent temperature, factoring in humidity, was reported as 39. The air conditioning in our building was apparently overloaded (like that's hard to do in our state of the art dog box) and it was almost as sweaty indoors as out. Not to mention the fact that the lifts started to play up and I was trapped inside not once, but twice. (Our 6 star energy-efficient building does not have a set of stairs (other than the fire stairs) which runs all the way to the ground floor, and when you descend from one floor to the other in the upper levels you find that the next stairway down is somewhere on the other side of the building, not even in clear line of sight. I'll bet that the architect won an award for that, too.)

The cloud cover that you see here may suggest that the temperatures were milder, but as noted above that isn't really true... though they may have mitigated the temperatures to some extent. The density of the cloud varied quite noticeably as you can see from the varying shades between white and grey, and most of it had burnt off by the evening. As I write this on Thursday evening a southerly breeze is blowing but the air remains quite warm.

I'm keeping to a somewhat minimalist theme at the moment, though that will most likely change tomorrow. (The PAD for which is likely to be late in the posting because I'll be on the move.) This is the top of the 87 metre high Sydney Harbour Control Tower (opened in 1974) from which shipping movements were controlled back when Sydney was a working harbour, before much of the freight was moved south to Port Botany and Wollongong. (Actually it covered Botany as well, but by radar and camera, not by direct vision.) I'm not sure what its fate will be now that its primary harbour has so little major ship traffic.

A corner of the Harbour Bridge can be seen in the background.

Last Year