Cairns today, fishing, & comparative apartment prices etc

It's a very hot blinding day here today, maybe 33 degrees Celsius, 80% humidity,2pm now...I went fishing early this morning before sunrise, with squid and pilchards for bait, but as soon as the sun came shattering-jangling silver across the deep jade sea you could feel the heat instantly rising, and coming in to shore, riding the breeze, much like a form of nausea.

The Coral Sea is really hotting up early this year. El Nino, that wild boy, is rising early and is highly likely to cause a lot of mischief here.

Whilst fishing,I almost caught a stingray, which was good because I didn't want to catch him, and I'm sure he didn't want to be caught. Almost was good enough for both of us predators.

The apartment here, as I mentioned before, is very good and the coolest place I've ever lived in in Cairns due to the central atria...so air is always rising up about 40 ft from the cool and shaded underground car park, up past the front door. Excellent design for the tropics, and we don't get the afternoon sun at all, which is the real killer.

To cool down a house here, even with a fully insulated roof and whirly-birds on top, can take about an hour...but this apartment takes about 5 minutes. The buildings are a modern Chinese design and altogether hold about 140 apartments. There's 6 buildings in the grounds and they go up about 4 floors above the car parks. Very similar to thousands of new apartment blocks we saw in Xiamen in China, except they went up about 30 floors.

Interestingly, apartment prices here in Cairns are pretty much exactly the same as something similar in Xiamen...a Chinese provincial city. 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, modern fancy stuff...similar lay-out..and about 12 sq metres. The overall size of the apartments is very similar...the main difference is that in the Chinese apartments the floors are marble and the fixtures and the heavy doors are all very good teak and oak wood.

Mind you, Xiamen prices are going up a dependable 10% every year, but ours are kind of, well, not going up at all really. Such is the fate of the West I think for a long time to come. I think it will be 2025 before the deep cost ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis are addressed, let alone resolved. Big corrections take at least two and sometimes three decades.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there because we bought the place to live in, not as an investment, and it's lovely and cool indeed. Our neighbours are mostly Chinese...many bought when we did, when the prices bottomed out $100,000 below cost.

I'd still like a house...somewhere to put a big dog and a meth lab etc as some of the house-neighbours here do. Mind you, if terrorists were smart, they'd just bomb a suburban meth lab in Cairns. The connective trigger- explosions as they all went up would take the city off the world map entirely....a ring of vicious poisonous fire spreading all the way through Manunda, Manoora, Bayview heights, Earlville, Edmonton, Brinsmead, Whitfield, and deeply into Edge Hill, all the way to the Botanic Gardens and up the Red Arrow track.

I'd like either a retired greyhound or a poodle...but not a small poodle...rather the full-sized big black hunting poodle...taller than a German Shepherd. All poodles are pretty smart, it's just that the full sized proper ones aren't so fucking psychotic or needful...because they are a real, proper dog...and quite well balanced of mind and disposition. Retired Greyhounds are good too, especially in apartments. They've done all their running and suffering for many years and just want to chill out.

My favourite dog remains the Egyptian/African Basenji but they would be really unhappy here unless they were jumping the fence and off in search of prey and bursting with their wondrous genetic wander-lust. I used to be a bit like that. My imaginary dog remains Phil, the Basenji, and he features in the one-day-to-be-finished quite short book, a ghost story, I'm going to spend some time editing over Christmas.

I hope we all have a good Christmas and don't allow our reasonably decent young men and women to kill remarkably innocent foreign men women and children; and harm themselves profoundly, although not as profoundly as their harm their victims... in Syria or Iraq. That would be my Christmas Wish...to let the Middle East work out the problems of the Middle East without us OR ANYONE ELSE involved AT ALL.
I reckon I should run this world...it'd be a lot better.
For me...although I probably wouldn't want to be you in that scenario.