Tress woke me up some time last night to say LBJ was hiding under our bed. Well she didn’t really wake me up, because I had been awake, looking out through our window at the spectacular display of light and sound in the skies. Electrical storms are rare, especially in Melbourne. I don’t recall another one in the 10 years we’ve been here. We got LBJ to come up onto the bed and he snuggled so close to me I had to stroke him and scratch him to calm him down.

The storms were electrifying. They went on for a while and with great intensity. This morning my usual train stopped just after Richmond and after a few minutes idling on the tracks, it headed towards Flinders Street instead of Parliament. Switching trains at Flinders, I managed to get into Parliament some 30 minutes past my usual time. The lady at the front desk commented I was late and we talked about the storms before I went about my shortened workout, trying to avoid aggravating the little blood blister on my left palm.

I’d like to think I’m reasonably healthy but on morning like today I get the sense that years of desk bound work has really deteriorated our physical strength. I had worked a bow saw and an axe to continue the long standing project of ridding the old lemon tree at the western corner of our backyard. The bow saw took off three of the core trunks which now stand about a couple of feet off the ground. The axe then broke those trunks down to 1-2 foot lengths. When the trunks had been so cut, I was drenched and my right hand was shaking. Mowing, edging and sweeping allowed the sweat to dry out and the shaking to abate. Tress helped with some edge trimming. Applying some weedkillers to “round up” the work left me quite spent and I headed in for a break before doing some cooking on the Webber – not for dinner but for our lunches today and tomorrow.