It's a Dry heat

One of the adjustments of moving into our new house is to discover all the ways it captures and fails to dispel heat. It currently being summer, there's ample opportunity for that.

It's most noticeable upstairs, which has these large windows with no tree cover, allowing the upstairs to heat up good. That's a problem if you are my wife trying to take an afternoon nap to sleep off holiday indulgences. (Though she's being much better about holiday indulgences than I am.) We have both a fan and a portable cooling unit for that room, which help somewhat. (The garage, conversely, is quite cool, and I continue to nap there as I did in our old house.)

But it's not just parts of the house that are breathing hot air all over us. Our new oven is fan-forced, so every time we open it to retrieve some food, it feels like we've gotten too close to a sleeping dragon and only hope we don't wake him up.

This is my flimsy excuse for my first post of 2022, related to my second viewing of 2022, the Australian drama/murder mystery The Dry, which was released exactly a year to the day before I watched it. 

It takes place in a rural Victorian town that hasn't had rain in 324 days, where the main character (played by Eric Bana) returns for the funeral of a childhood friend. The dust and dryness are total, as even the lake where a different childhood friend drowned is now totally devoid of water.

One of the reasons this post is flimsy is that our situation does not actually resemble a drought-stricken regional town. We get relief from a cool ocean breeze, one that can be too strong for its own good when you get right up next to the water, and though it's now been 13 days in the house with no rain, that rain is expected this week.

I also kind of feel like my first post of 2022 should relate directly to New Year's, as it usually does, but there was no real cinematic connection for anything about New Year's Eve or New Year's Day this year, in and of themselves. We did see Ghostbusters: Afterlife with my son for his eighth birthday, which is January 1st, but other than being our first in the new local cinema, that viewing was unremarkable.

I also could have opened with a post honoring Betty White, but she wasn't really a movie actor, and besides, I don't really need to contribute my own thoughts to the outpouring on social media. It's a shame she didn't make it to 100 -- she missed the century mark by even fewer days than Prince Philip -- but I couldn't really get behind the common observation that this was the final proof of what a terrible year 2021 was. You can shake your fists at the sky over the death of a 99-year-old, but you may just be expending your energies in the wrong place.

So The Dry it is.

It's a solidly constructed film, especially for its first three-quarters before it gallops a bit too quickly toward its conclusion. I also enjoyed the really familiar setting of these small regional Victorian towns with their pokies halls that look more like converted rec centers than either a restaurant or a bar. I guess I've been to enough small regional Victorian towns to feel like a real Australian now, after eight years and four months in the country.

And after 178 posts in 2021, now I've got one in 2022. 

Happy New Year all.