We still are thinking Summer! Still swimming most days – hope to keep it up for another month. Winter is too long to succumb to it yet! Bananas, capsicums, and even a small eggplant and a new pumpkin growing in the garden!

May is normally full-on winter for us and can be nasty, but it is not guaranteed.  Cannot trust the weather at all here, so I get ready in March for the Mid Latitude Westerlies start to making a reappearance. Frost normally starts after a big Southerly in mid-March  but it appeared in January this year instead. 2014 has been showing some very bad signs here, with mountain waves being collosal and updrafts a dime a dozen, the uplift bad, as well as storms trying to form here from convergence when we are under high pressure. Been dropped out of high pressure into the 990’s several times this year, and then back up again. Last month, a very cold 4.5C SW dropped us to 991 during a blocking anticyclone, LOL. Then what looked to be an SE low forming here during an anticylone also. It is a good thing Wellington Region’s climate is always zero CAPE, or this place would be a stormchasers paradise. I always prefer to see them capped, as I dont like the thought of being hit by a storm that is jammed in by the hills. Sorta makes me utterly dread winter because we are in unknown territory insofar as our declining climate goes, and that isn’t a good feel. The decline here is too far ahead of science for them to work out where to next, so we are alone insofar as that’s concerned. The camera is dusted off and waiting.