The Book of Ashes

Digression on hail, its dynamics and the forces of nature beyond our control. 1:19AM

Right now (that is the time mentioned above), in Wellington, it is hailing. Not the fuck me I'm going to die, golf balls, size hail, nor the owch, owch, owch, pea sized hail but only really the big grains of sand kind of hail. Its currently opted to turn into rain as we speak as I imagine hail to be quite high in the energy burning state. I mean rain just falls, its already in the sky and it falls due to gravity. Theres not a lot of energy, if any, thats required to set this in motion. In fact all thats required is for the rain to gather in one place and for all the individual dropplets to agree on a time to jump (or fall?). The best practical jokes that raindrops play is for them all to say 1, 2, 3, go... then hold back and watch one poor fella who wasn't in on it plummet to his death, all by himself. Anyway I'm digressing. Hail on the other hand requires some hard core refrigeration. Each individual raindrop needs to be frozen then released. Think of the power bill required if you were effectively freezing the entire kilometer cubed area above your city (its probably a much larger area than this but for arguements sake...). It would be huge. Hail therefore requires energy and energy is always in short demand. Once used up its all gone. You can't keep making clear frozen peas forever. Hail therefore doesn't usually last. Usually being the operative word. Say if you wanted to walk out in the hail to get into town and you were counting on it not lasting THEN, and only then, would it last. It would last until you found some proper shelter. Such are the laws of physics. Undenieably weighted against your favour. Its just like if you want it to rain then leave your raincoat at home. Doesn't matter if the sky is devoid of clouds, theres a high chance they will come and piss on you. Similarly if you want the sun to come out then wear only a hot jersey and leave your sunnies at home. Its almost guarunteed that the sun will pop out to say hi and blind you in its searing heat. Nature's friendly like that. Anyway back to the hail that turned into rain because it ran out of energy. It was kind of cool. Good day to stay inside and watch DVDs I think.

Gym was good yesterday. Dan cooked us up a legend feed of bacon & bananas on french toast. He ended up burping bacon & banana flavoured burps all through gym. I have now sussed the cross trainer machine which was a bitch to use when I started.

Sunday night I was going to go out to my sisters and meet her two Irish friends (with beautiful accents) but turned it down to go round to Bev & Jo's for dinner instead with Dan & Katrina. It was great to catch up with them and we had an excellent dinner. Bev was pretty fucked off at Osama Ben Cunt-face (his terminology) for bombing Bali and ruining his planned holiday there. If Bev ever gets his hands on him I think he would like to rough him up a little.

Anyway after dinner I got dropped off in town and caught up with Tom & Steve. We hung out for a while there then I left them too it around 3am. Steve was in a sticker placing mood and the other girls there were trying to set Tom up with someone. Was an alright night but looks like next weekend will be a big one.

It has stopped raining now and has become cold