Today was the first day back to work after a couple of boozy days, no thanks to the abnormal weather. Consecutive over-40 deg days confirm over-40 year olds should not consume excessive quantities of silly bwown bewewages. I meant brown beverages.I got home early on New Year’s eve. Stepping out of the office was like getting into an oven. It felt every bit like a 42 degree day. The walk to Prahran station is usually quite pleasant but on that day it was excruciating. It was probably the longest 1+ km I had ever walked. In my office attire and lugging my bag with the laptop in it, I thought I was finding out what the Kokoda trail must have felt like. Prahran to Richmond was fine but at Richmond the train was chockers and it the heat reminded me of my train rides in India. At Box Hill at last, I stopped by Safeway to pick up some salad mix and got home to fix the salad Tress had instructed, for the barbeque later that night.  A Redbank white which has been chilling in the fridge looked like a good idea as I fixed that salad. So did a remaining bottle of Four-X after that.aTress got home closer to 5 and I took kiddo out for a drive to the drive-in car wash. When I got back, we changed, packed the car boot with some chairs, the salad, some fish and scotch fillet I had marinated the night before and took off.We got to Alex and Li Har’s just before 6 and promptly had my 3^rd drink. That was the last one I counted. I was standing over the stove for the next 3 hours and couldn’t remember not having a bottle or a plastic tumbler (with a white bubbly beverage) in my hand the entire time, or at any time during the 3 hours after that.We got home close to 1am. I hit the sack after a quick shower and the still very warm weather made for a restless night. We were in bed till 10am the next day. It was again very hot. We pottered around the house a little bit, did bits of work and tried to call a couple of restaurants for a yum-cha lunch but the 2 I called were both booked out. Alex and Li Har found a place and we went to meet them there. The imaginatively named place (Yum Cha Inn) had very nice food but poor air conditioning so the sweltering conditions found no respite.We escaped to the nearby Glen shopping centre for that, and Tress bought some clothes for kiddo. We then picked up a couple of DVD’s from a video rental place (Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard 4.0” and Anthony Hopkins’ “Fracture” – both very clichéd but enjoyable fare).In between the 2 movies, Tress and I went out to the garden to do some tidying up. The cool change finally arrived and it was great to be outdoors and not feel so oppressed. I trimmed some branches and cleared up the driveway while Tress did some weeding. Kiddo was enjoying Simpsons the whole time and though it was around 8pm when we finished with the garden, it was still very bright.And so the new year arrives on a super hot day with all of us being in a bit of a daze trying to cope.