Well, for the past two-and-a-half hours, we’ve been slowly baking in our house, trying to stave off the heat. At either a few minutes before or after four, the power at our house turned off.

After the power had been off for around ten minutes, I attempted to call the “power outages” hotline (I initially thought each power company had one, but it seems they all share the one) for the next 45 minutes to no avail — the number was either busy, reported as non-existent, or the phone network simply failed.

Finally, after an hour and ten minutes of no power, I managed to get through to the recorded message saying power had been cut to “some areas” for two-and-a-half hours. Wow. No explanation other than “we were told to”.

At six, a neighbour had a TV blaring (no idea how) so we listened, over 100,000 suburban homes had no power because of bush fires disrupting power flow. Wow again.

Incidentally, the hottest part of the day today in many areas was between 4:30 and 6:30, which is when the power was out; the temperature hit over 42 in some areas, so it was obviously not very comfortable.

Two-and-a-half hours after the power initially disappeared, it came back. At least we’ll be able to cook dinner tonight!