Four Reasons to Disregard the Advice in my Last Post

Reason one: Once good and liquored up, you may have a drunken phone conversation with your mother-in-law in which you agree to get up obscenely early and drive her into the City. You may not remember the next day whether you sounded drunk or not, but will suspect that you did.

Reason two: On waking up obscenely early, you may find that it has rained so heavily overnight that there is a river running down your street and your garage is flooded, requiring you to schlep around in the mud (with a hangover) trying to redirect the water flow so that it doesn't get into the main part of the house.

Reason three: Did I mention the part about it being obscenely early?

Reason four: When you wake up at stupid o'clock you may have a raging hangover and find that you're alone and there is no one there to make you coffee, bring you Aspirin, or take care of Reasons One to Three for you.

Hail, flash floods and their effects on cognitive powers

This weekend just gone was the three day Labour Day weekend. Ordinarily I would spend it catching up with friends but instead, thanks to freak weather storms that brought tennis ball sized hail and flash flooding I spent a good portion of the weekend holding a bucket up to my front window to stop the rain from flooding the lounge room.

We were lucky to avoid this kind of hail at our house, but the bottom of our street had a river running through it. We live in a sort of valley, and our house is on a pretty steep slope so luckily it didn’t affect us, but not so much our neighbours who had a small river running past their front doors.


When the rain eased off a bit, we were finally able to go to bed, although I didn’t really sleep much, because the rain was so heavy on the roof that the sound kept waking me up.

And my total lack of sleep is pretty well summed up by this wonderful moment of heightened intelligence:
I woke up to the radio alarm blaring. The news was on and the announcer said something to the effect of “and this weekend brought us the eighty second academy awards” and I thought to myself “Wow, how did they fit the whole thing into eighty seconds?”

Clearly I need to go back to bed.

A Trip to the Airport

On Thursday night I had to head to the airport to pick up KJ. His flight was supposed to be in at about 4pm, so I was planning on leaving about 15 minutes before that to make what should have been a 20 minute drive to the airport. At about 3:30, an enormous storm hit Melbourne. The lightning seemed to be almost nonstop and the rain was so heavy that I was soaked to the bone just from running from the building to my car 10 metres away. I had to drive in that. There was so much water streaming down and sitting on the road that for the 10km of highway I drove on in the pelting rain, I could barely see a thing. Traffic was crawling along at about half the speed limit and every time a truck passed by, visibility was reduced to pretty much nothing.

10km’s up the highway, the traffic came to a halt and I spent the next hour creeping inch by inch towards the airport. I thought that when I got to the airport everything would be ok, but a tree had fallen onto a car on the road that passes the airport exit, so the police were diverting all traffic through the airport. It took me another 10 minutes just to get in, and even longer to get out.


All in all what should have been an hour round trip ended up taking about three hours. It spins me out that some people drive to and from work in traffic like this every day. How can they stand it?! It’s just wasted time. You can’t do anything constructive, because you have to pay attention to the constant creeping forwards. And all to travel a distance that should take less than half the time! Your job would have to be seriously rewarding for you to want to waste 2-3 hours a day in transit. Either that or you would have to be paid well enough to justify sacrificing that much personal time in order to get to work.

Personally, my limit for travel is about 35 minutes in either direction. Any further than that and I can’t imagine it being worth it. Maybe it’s my laziness talking, but if I had to get up for work more than 2 hours before I started, I can’t imagine I’d last long in that job.

It was a dark and stormy night....

I would like to recognise the efforts of a man who did a really great thing last night and will have received no acknowledgement. It was a little thing, but it made my life and the lives of about a hundred other people a hell of a lot easier on a cold, miserable, stormy night.

On the way home last night it was raining incredibly heavily – and also a little sideways. The run from my office to my car – about 10 or 15 metres – had me completely soaked through. Winds were up to about 100km/h and it was difficult to see the road ahead of you. Traffic crawled in the kind of way that would usually be annoying, but was completely fine given the terrible conditions.

Not far from work, there is a narrow section of road that is bordered all the way along by big gum trees. As I came up to this section of road, traffic came to a halt. A tree had fallen down across the road and was blocking traffic. Minor inconvenience normally, but it was raining so hard that the prospect of a bunch of people having to get out of their cars and move it wasn’t ideal and it was too muddy and dark to try to turn around and find another way home.

Enter fork-lift man.

He drove out of a nearby factory into the full rain and proceeded to push the tree out of everyone’s way. He would have been soaked to the bone in a matter of seconds. It would have been a wet, miserable job . He could have been hit by more falling tree branches, or by some impatient driver - but he did it anyway.

What a champ! He made my night. Well, at least until I got home and found that the power lines were down outside my house and the lounge room window had leaked water all over the carpet. But right up until then, he made my night! Thanks Fork-Lift man!

I can see clearly now the rain has gone

My level of blindness is definitely getting out of hand. Tonight it was pouring with rain while I was driving home and I spent the entire drive hunched over the steering wheel like a little old lady, squinting at the road through the rain. I have to admit, more than once I was just guessing at where I was supposed to be driving.

I used to blame the old lady driving technique on the bad headlights in my old 1977 Holden, but now that have a brand new car, I can’t really use that excuse any more. I’m either going to have to come up with a new excuse, or go and get my eyes checked.

I’m open to all suggestions for new excuses, because I really, really don’t want to have to get glasses; although given the fact that I nearly drove into a strange driveway because I thought it was the road, perhaps it’s for the best.

Buckets of Rain

Yesterday the bottom of my street was submerged in a flowing river of rainwater. Some kind of bizarre flash flood type rain jumped out of the sky and soaked all of Melbourne from head to toe. It’s not such a bad thing, since we’re in the middle of a pretty severe drought – I just wish it would rain into the catchments a little more and onto my lounge room carpet a little less.

I spent half an hour during the most torrential part of the rain holding a bucket to the lounge room window in a vain attempt to catch the water that was streaming in thanks to the blocked drain pipe outside. I was soaked within minutes, but at least I got a good view of the bizarre river that was flowing through the front yard of the people across the road. We live on a street that is sort of on the side of a hill - our house is way above street level and the people across the road are way below street level. This means that while they were submerged in a brown, frothy tide of rain water, I was standing at my window watching the water flow down our steep driveway and add to the river below.

If I was a better blogger, I would have taken a photo of the river and posted it here you could see how bad it really was. As it turns out, holidays have made me lazy and unmotivated and to be honest, the only reason I’ve managed to blog at all is because I have a laptop computer and I didn’t have to get up from the couch to do it. I figure this is ok, because that’s what holidays are all about – not leaving the couch without a good, solid reason.

I’m going to have to get myself motivated to get off the couch, because with Christmas day coming up very soon, I have a lot to do. This year I’ve decide that I’m going to bake, and I thought that in aid of trying something new and different I’m going to bake a pumpkin pie. I have a recipe from Carrie that I’m going to have a go at. Sadly for me it will be a lot more work because in Australia we have a devastatingly limited selection of canned vegetables, so I’m going to have to purée my own pumpkins.

It should be interesting given that I’ve never done this before, but it’s worth a go, I think. Every Aussie that I’ve spoken to who has tried pumpkin pie has hated it, so I’m beginning to thing that maybe pumpkin pie is a taste that Americans are conditioned into liking – much like Aussies and Vegemite. It could be very disappointing.

I’ll let you know.