Cyclone Power!

I know, it's been a good long while since I last posted. But we've been living through a cyclone, so I have a good excuse.

The day before it started really raining, we went for a hike up Minyon Falls, which is beautiful


For those of you who didn't already read about it on the news, a cyclone has been hitting the north east of Australia pretty hard, our local area has been getting winds up to 110km/ hour and 5-6M swells.

Its been raining more than I ever thought possible. I don't have an accurate gauge, but I put a bucket outside and it fills up in half a day. the neighbours a bit down the mountain (who are getting less rain than us) measured 680mm in 4 days on their gauge! Most of the rivers around here are flooded, our road is washed away in many parts, and people who live just a bit further up have been flooded in for over a week; they've already been getting SES helicopter drops of food. Towns all around us are being evacuated and the whole area is on flood warning. Most of the beaches have been closed.

Here's the view from our back door. Notice that my Veggie garden is now a Veggie Jungle


and, fun fun fun! We live in a very small one-room cottage (about 550 sq feet) and have an outdoor toilet. So much rain has fallen on us water is starting to come in the walls; we actually have internal waterfalls, and mushrooms are growing on the rockwork!!
Here's the wall behind the love seat. Note that the water is flowing pretty fast down that wall! It comes out into the floor under the love seat and then trickles its way through the rock floor into the bathroom area. Of course, this is making the floor cave in.

Our little blue car got stupidly bogged in an impossible way in our own yard as well.

So, if being three people in a small space in heavy weather for an extended period isn't enough, the power cut out!!! and it took Four Days to get power back on.

We all just sat at home, going slightly stir crazy, getting wet, everything being damp, all our food in the fridge going bad, Purple being unable to work, Littletree going insane. We read a lot, and did some art, and read some more, and I started teaching Littletree to play guitar.

Sunday was a little less rain :) and we went down for the markets.
Here's how our little creek looked on the way down

And here's the driveway of one of our neighbours. Thank goodness where we live is on high ground :)


In town was so humid I felt like dying, but at least it wasn't raining for a bit. Littletree took some nice photos, and we managed to get a few people to come up the hill with us and help get the car out of the mud.

We tried pushing, that didn't work. We'd already jacked the car up and put boards under the tyres, that didn't work. In the end, with the rain starting again, the five of us put our backs to it and lifted the front of the car just a tad, then lifted the back of the car and managed to shift it half a metre. Then we managed to push it out to freedom :D Phew!

Thankfully then the power came back on too, and we could get back to our internet-addicted lives. Only Purple's computer isn't working and it's becoming a nightmare. But more about that later.