Two Torrid Weeks

It's blowing a gale outside, not unexpectedly as the warnings have been coming for 3 days on news reports of severe windstorms. The warnings include the likelihood that many trees will uprooted as the high rainfall of recent weeks will have weakened root systems. Something like that. Enough to spook me when we have  numerous large eucalypts in the proximity of our house.

Trees down in the district means we'll almost certainly lose power. I may not get to finish this post today. The weather for most of the last fortnight has been deplorable with many days wet and cold. I remember last October after we returned from Europe it was dry and warm to hot with some days 30C+. This year it has been rain and more rain, difficult to get work done, and to keep the firewood up. It has only been the last few days that it has warmed sufficiently to not light the fire of an evening. It's set and ready to go in expectation of the next cold snap which may be as soon as today with no power to boot.

I have been afflicted with the flu for the last fortnight. I have not been as sick as that for a long time. It started with the nose thing moved into the throat and gradually worked deeper into the lungs. I have hacked uncontrollably day in day out. The fever consumed me, being freezing cold so going early to bed only to be overtaken by raging night sweat leaving my pillow and singlet and pyjama collar wet with sweat. I have slept this past two weeks in the spare room so as not to destroy Lib's sleep.

As if part of a bigger picture curse on me, many other things have gone wrong during this period. At the height of my fevers there was a Puffing Billy information night, which I was encouraged to attend by PB after my protestations by email at their shifting to Gembrook as their Event Hub, meaning 18 event days  (traffic jams and mayhem) clogging the town, 12 before Christmas, and 6 in March. I sat watching the power point show of all the boxes ticked...money for the scouts helping car parking, money for the school committee for parking on the school oval, money for the CFA by their sausage sizzle, more pizza sales for the pizza shop, more beer sales for the pub, more milk sales for the supermarket, 12000 tickets already sold... I listened for half an hour before standing to interject and tell them they were bringing the rat race to our quiet little town and destroying the quiet rural atmosphere and our peaceful lifestyle which is the very reason we live there.

Last Tuesday I had scheduled a Park advisory Group meeting before our NHP committee meeting and the president asked me could I chair the COM meeting as she had a funeral to attend, and another meeting on Wednesday was organised to discuss our brochure with the graphic designer. Feeling totally ill I managed to get through the meetings on Tuesday and got home to find the power was out and when I checked my mobile phone it was nearly out of charge but there was a message from Rob's housemate saying that Rob was in hospital.

AT THIS POINT let me say that I'm resuming this post after some 44 hours. Yes, as I predicted last Sunday the power went off while I was posting, at about 11am. It was out till 3.30am this morning about 40 hours. I had unplugged our two freezers before I went to bed as I didn't want to have them come on while we were asleep and refreeze what may have thawed. Fortunately I heard the power come on at 3.30am, I had trouble getting to sleep and must have been dozing lightly and there's a sort of little beeping noise as the power comes on, enough to alert me. The big stuff eg chicken, lamb leg beef piece and casseroles were still frozen hard but small stuff like little bacon packets were soft so I took them out and put them in the fridge, and plugged the freezers in again. There's a lot things in there like bread loaves and packets of berries and lunch packs which we'll discard when we get to defrost but I wanted to get the freezers on again quickly with as little disturbance as possible but I needed to know what was what in there, was any of it retrievable?

I'll cut this post short as I have much to do now. To fill you in on Rob, he had a kidney infection and was in hospital a couple of days. Lib went down on Wednesday as she was off work and took him home to where he lives in Wantirna. I spoke to him yesterday and he's feeling quite well, the antibiotics seem to have worked. He has an ultrasound booked for this Thursday as they investigate why the infection started. With the power outage we communication problems as our cordless phone and answering machine does not work with no power. The mobiles were not working, towers down. My bacon was saved yesterday because I had an old phone that plugs straight into the wall which Gord and I bought at cash converters for $10. This has auxilary back up from standard triple A batteries if the power is out, and we searched high and low years ago after being caught out one time. As it happened it allowed Gord and I both to complete some important business that otherwise would have caused great inconvenience in Gord's case and some financial loss in my case had we not been able to make a couple of simple calls early in the day.

I started this post to tell you about my horrible couple of weeks, but then I was going on to talk about some good things, namely the fact that Rickyralph made it to 65 years old in that period, and that all the beautiful rain has made the soil in my garden so soft to dig, even near the euc trees, and I have had great joy planting some things into it. And the Bulldog premiership.

So I'll post again soon.