A new worry

I guess if you are not getting rain or if you are somewhere cold, the North Queensland obsessiveness about our rain could be getting a bit boring. In spite of that I just had to add one more thing.

At about 11 pm last night Mr Sunshine and I were about to go to bed and a funny thing happened in the toilet - in the toilet bowl to be exact. You know how, when you flush it, it is supposed to all disappear down the S bend. It didn't. The water from the cistern just emptied into the bowl and stayed there. In fact it looked like it was actually filling from below as well. Water was rising in the bowl. Do you know how scary that is late at night when you really want to unwind, go to sleep and not have to worry about waking up and finding that your bed is floating around in an indescribable smelly soup?

The good thing is that it was all pretty clear water. Not pretty as such, I mean fairly clear water.
You see this is a very flat city. It gives the civil engineers a big headache trying to get drainage right. Drainage only works if everything can run downhill. When you get lots and lots of rain, it confuses the drainage system. I think my junior science teacher said, "Water always finds its own level." When you syphon a fish tank you have to have the end of hose in the tank higher than the end out of the tank. Right? Transfer that logic to sewerage. The sewerage pipes are all well underground, but lately the ground water level from all of the rain is above ground - and we are trying to make the sewerage in the pipes run down lower than the surrounding ground water. You see the problem?

What to do? The bowel water (that was a typo, I meant "bowl" water, but the typo fits so well) level seemed to stop about 10 cm from the top so, (just in case) I got a collection of bathmats and placed them around the bowl to stop any overflow from escaping into the bedroom - I hoped. I worried, checked the weather bureau's radar maps of where the heaviest rainfalls were and went to bed. The rain had eased off at last.

In the nick of time, if you ask me.

Biblical proportions

It's official. It's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights. The newspaper says so.
Just last week I was telling someone that I felt like Mrs Noah, but then I thought about it and rephrased my statement. I actually feel like one of Mrs Noah's neighbours who watched the ark float gently away on the rising flood while being left with a mop and bucket and lots of misplaced optimism.

My rain gauge said we had 200 mm (8 ins) of rain from noon yesterday till noon today. The surprising prediction for tomorrow is . . .




rain.

It's still raining

If you click on the collage you will enlarge it. Clockwise from top left -

1. My feet sinking into the marsh that is my front lawn.

2. It looks like a pile of dirt, but it is a dead ant cemetery. Whenever it rains they bring all their mates' little ant bodies into my house :(

3. Front door mat, Venice style.

4. The wind did us a favour by bringing down the dead branches out of all the trees around the town.

5. The bucket on the patio filled up entirely with rain water just by being left out in the open for a couple of days.

6. I was about to open the windows for some fresh air when I looked out over the neighbour's houses and changed my mind.

So far this week we have had nearly 250mm of rain (10 ins) and more is expected tomorrow. A botanist back in the early days of settlement described this part of Australia as an area of total drought with intermittent floods. Some things never change.

Cyclone, but not really

For Mr Sunshine's birthday in December I decided to get him a weather station on behalf of the whole family. It has been great. I check it all the time and keep a tally of the rainfall. Mr Sunshine just laughs at my OCD over his birthday gift.
I thought it would be a good gift because in the past he has been a bit obsessive about keeping tabs on the weather. Oh well.
This little electronic machine gives us the barometric pressure, inside and outside temperature and humidity, rainfall, dew point, wind chill factor, wind speed plus date and time. Last night a small (category 1) cyclone crossed the coast on the western side of the peninsula and today it has rained steadily all day.
If you think of the cyclone rotating in a clockwise direction and it is to the west of us and we are on the east coast, it makes sense that the winds we are getting are from the Pacific Ocean side and that is why they are loaded with rain. When cyclones come from the east, we get the wind from the west (overland) and therefore very little or even no rain. That probably doesn't make much sense unless you are interested in cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons or whatever they are called all over the world.
Anyway, bottom line is we've had over 100 mm of rain today and the weather bureau has said we can expect 300 mm by tomorrow(100 mm = 4 ins). Our top wind speed so far has only been about 30 kph (about 18 mph). The really good news is that all this rain causes the temperature to drop and it's only about 22 degrees centigrade outside at present (about 72 farenheit). Just perfect. And most folk around here love rain when we get it because we have a long dry season.
If you have to have a cyclone, Charlotte is definitely one of the better ones.