THIS is not a rant and rave over the shortcomings of the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
Yes, we were supposed to go into a scorchingly, dry El Nino and yes, it feels like a La Nina event. The little girl does seem to be playing with us.
Well, all I can say is ‘play on!’.
Right through to the end of October last year, our front yard and the paddock in front of that looked like a brown wasteland.
I have lived through some depressingly long droughts and it seemed like we were heading into another … the type that makes one not want to look out the window or even take a quick glance at the garden.
And yet here we are, four months later and the grass in the front yard is so green, the colour appears to vibrate.
As for the front paddock, it has turned from a block of sunburnt brown to grass so high it’s forming a privacy screen.
And every time we anticipate the arrival of the man who is going to bale it, the rain clouds appear.
But, I repeat, this is not a complaint.
The BoM scientists have assured us that it is possible to get good rain during an El Nino … and this season their words have been proved to be correct, over and over again.
Combined with the heat and humidity, one would have to say it has been an amazing growing season … for all things.
My husband swears that as he runs the ride-on mower along one length of the lawn and turns to come back, the grass he just mowed has already grown a couple of centimetres.
The bugs seem to be loving it too.
The mud wasps are feasting on the fine sandy mud beside our driveway and are ecstatically building nests on anything that doesn’t move for a day or two.
I looked down on a ledge made by a kickboard near our stove on Sunday, to find that this highly trafficked area had not escaped their building fervour … honestly, I wish I could harness their determination.
It also seems they have invited some of their not-so-close relatives to join them. This year, we are also finding nests of other mud wasp types, which use some kind of sticky substance to glue, and I mean glue, their nest in any available crack and crevice. Hard to remove, very hard.
But all these are first-world problems.
If every El Nino event had the decency to turn the area almost tropical, then I would be a happy woman.
