The Wind

It's windy today. You think, so what, it's just wind. But this is actually wind enough to blog about, in my opinion at least. It has nothing to do with me being bored as well...nothing at all.

We left our window open last night in hopes of somewhat avoiding the funk with which a night of two sleeping humans seems to fill a room (or apartment). As a result, we awoke at something-early-am to the sound of our blinds being relentlessly whipped by the early gusts. "What is that," asked Kane. "It's the blinds, we left the window open," I respond. We can typically sleep through anything, but it really sounded like someone had broken into our home and was spastically frolicking in a mountain of Hot Wheels toy cars on our living room floor.

We went for our morning jog and were met with a mean head wind on the way back - so rude. We saw plastic bags flying 50 feet in the air around us (and yes, it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. American Beauty, anybody?) I thought it would die down, but it's been pounding on our building all day. We first noticed the extremity of the situation just before our jog; I re-opened the sliding glass door to air out the place while we were out and my ears popped just as the door cracked open. Then, as I went to exit the apartment, I was almost unable to open our front door due to the ridiculous pressure coming in through the window, holding the door shut.

Throughout the day, it has sounded like a veritable hurricane is passing through our apartment (this is with the windows shut). I swear, it's worse in here than it is even outside. I'm not sure if it's because of our A/C being connected by a fan to the outside, or if our balcony draws some sort of magnificent wind eddie, or if our building is just the most non-aerodynamic structure in the world, but it's freaking loud in here.

So, the wind has been blowing on and on all day long, but it's really the booms and the creaks that are the scariest. We're on the 14th floor, so I'm not sure how much sound, and wind for that matter, gets exaggerated at this height, but every once in a while there are huge booms that come from inside the building somewhere. Sometimes the sound is smaller and appears to come from the ducts in the walls/ceiling of our apartment. In these cases it sounds like there is a kid with a Nerf baseball bat trying to get out of an aluminum box in our ceiling. It's not scary just more strange, especially when you add that picture to it.

Then there are the big booms that must come from somewhere else in the building like the elevator shafts or giant ducts in the hallway or something. These sound like the kid in the aluminum box has been dropped 7 stories onto an immense aluminum bass drum. Then there are the cracking noises which sometimes sound like the expanding or contracting of glass or steel mullions and sometimes sound like the concrete slab of our floor yielding to the storm and dropping us, along with our building, neatly into the harbor.

I swear, I must watch too many movies, but with every *pannng* or *bwooonk* of the building I get some sort of Die Hard-Matrix-Indiana Jones scene playing out in my head. It typically involves the dramatic structural failure and collapse of our building (spalling concrete crumbling, yielding steel creaking, sparks, steam, flickering lights: the works) and subsequent, improbable yet completely possible, valiant action-hero escape of Kane and I to safety. In these daydreams I always remember to grab my laptop, just as Will Smith grabs the cat at the last second as the house is demoed in I Robot. Memories are precious, people.

So that has been our day. Oohing and aahing (and flinching) at the sounds of our building screaming in the wind. We look outside to see that the city is covered with what looks like smog, but since it has only showed up today, we assume it's the dirt and crap that has been kicked up by this gnarly wind. Since it's Melbourne, I anticipate completely different weather conditions tomorrow, whatever they may be, and I look forward to them.