01/03/2022 Big Floods andSmall Things

This past week the east coast of Australia was visited by an unprecedented weather event which caused widespread flooding in Queensland and continues to do so as it moves casually down the NSW coast. Thankfully all our family and friends managed to stay mostly high and dry, with the odd sogginess around the edges, the threat of an involuntary stay in a hotel for a few days, and the beginning of what promises to be a lengthy discussion with an overwhelmed insurance company over a leaking roof.

We watched the news, which led with stories of tragedy and heroism played out in small dinghies amidst raging torrents of flood water. This was immediately followed by a local news item about a storm which dropped a torrential 25mm over Adelaide, leading to flooding that in parts reached ankle depth.

I shouldn't make fun of South Australia. It really is very dry and as a consequence South Australia doesn't bother with drainage to the same extent as the east coast, with the result that 25mm of rain is much more noticeable here. At least, it is if you're South Australian. I went for a walk in the light morning drizzle, and when I got home Roger informed me that I had been out in a severe weather event, which explained the little grumbles of thunder that I heard.

Belair NP in the rain. Sufficient rain to trigger a warning, regarding the severity of the weather, to Roger's phone.

I spent all day working in a nice large office with my laptop plugged into a nice big screen and my bottom firmly parked in a nice comfortable office chair. Mind you, I discovered halfway through my video call that the comfortable office chair has a fault which causes it to suddenly and without warning drop down to its lowest height setting. This caused unseemly hilarity in the people to whom I was speaking at the time, such that I had to turn my sound off to silence their most unprofessional laughter.

While we're on the subject of sound, one of the challenges of house sitting is operating the myriad of remote controls and entertainment systems that exist in different houses.  We haven't been able to find a volume control on this remote, 

Pure evil.

so the TV is either too loud for comfort or so soft that we can't hear it for the freight trains and parrots outside.  We've been here a week and every night we've sat on the couch and grumbled about the lack of volume control.

Today we finally clicked that there's a whole other lounge room with a second big TV which has its own remote control complete with sensible things like obvious volume buttons.  

Now that's more like it!

The couch in there isn't as comfortable but that's a small price to pay for the power of volume control. We watched a whole show and amused ourselves by turning the volume up and down at will, and from this you can rightly deduce that it doesn't take much to amuse us these days.

Speaking of amusement, we have booked ourselves up with a rigorous schedule of events courtesy of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, but more about that in a later entry. I have more important things to think about at the moment, like another day's work tomorrow and scouting around the house for a chair that doesn't make me suddenly disappear from shot when I'm on a video call.  And I've got a remote control to play with as well!

Belair National Park.