Power outage

 

During yesterday's power outage, the phone rang and an unfamiliar woman's voice asked, "Do you have the power on down there?"

"No, we don't!" I replied, and added, "Who's calling?"

"Oh, you wouldn't know me", the voice replied.

It was one of those l'esprit d'escalier moments when I wished I had replied, "Well, you being so rude, I probably wouldn't want to know you" but she had already hung up.

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man - which I am! - but why would someone who has my phone number and, judging by the 'down there' qualifier, knows where I live, asked me for some information and then refuse to give her name?

Why are people so rude these days? Don't answer that; I think I know!

 

I think we've dodged the bullet

A photo of the jetty taken at 10 o'clock this morning

 

The whole of Australia's east coast has been on an extreme weather alert. Huge rainfalls in the hundreds of millimetres in just two days and a king tide at 8:30pm on Sunday which was the highest tide of the year, coincided with the largest-scale storms in recent decades.

After the Gold Coast and Brisbane and the Northern Rivers, it was Sydney's turn where residents were evacuated from Chipping Norton, Milperra, Woronora, Lansvale, and Picton due to flooding. In addition, a large numbers of main roads, including across Sydney's metropolitan area, were closed.

On Sydney's northern beaches, the erosion of Collaroy Beach - click also here - has been the worst since 1974, and residents were evacuated overnight after houses, a block of units, and the beach club at Collaroy were damaged by wild surf caused by the storm.

Then the severe weather moved to our South Coast and we spent an anxious night watching the tide at Batemans Bay Bridge, and again this morning when a 1.54m-tide at 9.24 am combined with the rainwater run-off from the mountains.

The rain has since eased although the run-off continues and the next test will be tonight's high tide (another king tide of 2.04m) at 9.35 pm.

In the meantime, I keep an eye on the all-important waterflow at the upstream pump station at Brooman which stood at 181,877 ML/day at a water level of 10.05m at 6 o'clock this morning but has since dropped which makes me think that we may have dodged the bullet.

Here are the subsequent Brooman readings:

Time	Level (m)	Flow (ML/day)
6am	10.05	181,877
2pm	8.90	128,163
3pm	8.55	114,610
4pm	8.18	101,406
5pm	7.76	87,757
6pm	7.30	74,705
7pm	6.85	63,305

What may sound like a sigh of relief to you is the air escaping from my deflating water-wings as I pack them away for another day.

Five o'clock in the evening along the mighty Clyde River
"Dark blue is the river; Golden is the sand
It flows along forever; With trees on either hand..."

 

The Lottery of Life

 

The chances of winning the largest payout in a lottery is about 1 in 14 million. And yet our brain – that faulty walnut through which we assess reality – has the habit of holding out hopes for our happiness equivalent to winning the jackpot.

If we could really see what life was like for most people, if we could peer into everyone’s lives and minds, we would know how frequent disappointments are, how many unfulfilled ambitions there are, and how much confusion and uncertainty is being played out in private and how many breakdowns and intemperate arguments unfold every day.

Knowing this can comfort and reassure us and make us a little more forgiving towards ourselves for not having won the Lottery of Life.

 

Emma Chisit

 

The Tally-Ho cigarette paper was missing but apart from that he was the complete Norman Gunston look-alike, right down to the comb-over.

However, he was not Garry McDonald and he was not from Glen Innes. But he was still leaning on the gate and waving me towards him.

I almost said, "You look ridiculous". Instead I asked, "Can I help you?"

"You're selling, are you?" he asked, pointing to the sign.

Wow, I thought, this guy can read!!! "Yes, I am!"

"Emma Chisit?"

"Emma Chisit? Sorry, I don't know her."

After we had sorted out what he wanted to know, I also gave him my phone number and a friendly wave but not a second thought.

 

It's the first day of winter

 

Winter is not my favourite season, not even an Australian winter which is no worse than a cool Teutonic summer.

I like the outside to be about the same as the inside. About 37°C is the human body's normal temperature, and about 37°C on the outside is also normal for me.

And that's what it should be right now in tropical Far North Queensland where I had gone after I'd thrown in my last expatriate job in sunny Greece following a badly misdiagnosed case of homesickness in 1985.

I settled again in Townsville but found I was still too highly strung to accept a life of idleness and so I fled to the financial fleshpots of Sydney and Canberra.

Click on image to enlarge

As Robert Frost put it so aptly in his poem 'The Road Not Taken', I kept the return to Far North Queensland for another day and yet knowing how way leads on to way and doubting if I should ever go back, I finally retired to the small coastal village of Nelligen.

And that, I am telling you with a sigh, has made all the difference.
And not only in temperature.