Summer ends on Saturday - and good riddance you shout.
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On the upside, at least there wasn't a plague of locusts.
And if we're seeking a silver lining, the Bureau of Meteorology has just revealed it may not have been quite as bad as last summer.
A spokesman said for Canberra "both maximum and minimum temperatures were well above average but lower than last summer (2018-19)".
Despite the wet February, rainfall was below average.
But it was bad. Who doubts it was bad?
We had fire on top of drought - and then floods on the South Coast. Hailstones as big as tennis balls dented the profits of insurers as surely as they punched holes in car windscreens. Car panel beaters will be prosperous for calamities to come.
And smoke so thick it destroyed this year's vintage for some of the wineries around the city. Smoke so thick, it made Beijing seem clean. Smoke so thick, our eyes and throats hurt. It was like living under a dirty yellow filter for days on end.
And we had the death of an idyll.
Everybody remembers the golden days of childhood summers, and old Canberrans are no exceptions. They will tell you about racing around lawns dodging sprinklers or of picnicking by Lake Burley Griffin.
Or swimming in the Manuka pool.
"The pool was the social centre where the young people met to swim, sunbake, dive and socialise," according to Merv Knowles, who remembered the pool opening. "It was definitely the place to be in summer and sometimes they'd have to close the doors for a while when they couldn't fit in any more people."
But this summer was the one where we hid from the weather - if we could. Some people moved into hotels which had cleaner air than the atmosphere in their own homes.
New Year's Eve fireworks? Too dangerous.
Those imagined lazy days by the beach or lounging by the pool, with barbecues and family games of cricket became toast.
The reality was refugees from fire huddling on beaches. Pools became places where people hid in an attempt to survive.
Visit Canberra's pitch to tourists doesn't look quite so hot now: "Set your sights on Canberra this summer. The nation's capital is ideal for a quick weekend jaunt, or even a longer sojourn. With a slew of waterfront cafes, small bars and cultural must-dos on offer this season, there's no better time to pay the city a visit."
But haven't we been here before? There was a more costly bushfire in 2003. And for Australia as a whole, the summer of 2012 to 2013 was dubbed the 'angry summer' because so many heat records were broken.
Childhood memories aren't reliable, anyway. We remember the schools-out idyll without the flies and the rainy days of summer.
But this summer has been different. The figures say so. Firstly, the bushfire season started earlier, before even the end of winter.
The Bureau of Meteorology has charted the long-term changes:
- Australia's climate has warmed just over one degree since 1910, leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events.
- Oceans around Australia have warmed by around one degree since 1910, contributing to longer and more frequent marine heatwaves.
- Sea levels are rising around Australia, increasing the risk of inundation.
- The oceans around Australia are becoming more acidic.
There have now been three winters in a row where the usual rains simply haven't happened, and that's unprecedented since records began, even during the terrible Millennium Drought 20 years ago.
And the figures show Canberra's temperatures this year have been above those hot days which older people remember as their lazy, hazy days of summer.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, maximums in Canberra for January and February right up to this last week of summer have been two to four degrees higher than the average for 1961 to 1990. Rainfall has been about the same.
The bad news is that the best scientists don't think the bad summer that's ending is "the new normal".
It's worse than that, according to climate scientist, Dr Sophie Lewis of the University of New South Wales in Canberra.
The trend is for extreme weather to get more extreme so this summer was not a new plateau.
"The worst is yet to come and that's regardless of what we do to reduce emissions because some warming is locked in," Dr Lewis said.
She likened it to boiling water in a saucepan - if you turn the heat off, the boiling continues for a while.
"If we want to do something to avoid the worst impact of climate change, we really have to reduce emissions," she said.
Welcome to the new (worsening) normal!
- Dr Sophie Lewis will give a talk on climate change at the Kingston Hotel on March 11. A free drink is on offer.
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
