stay in your home that will tumble like a house of cards

stay in your home that will tumble like a house of cards
Originally uploaded by Auswomble

Scary stuff up north, but my blog, so me first and we'll get to Yasi.

Yesterday, my first day of the year without a single step run, I spent mostly indoors. Which was probably a good thing considering how fucking hot it was. Most people who ventured outside in Sydney were onyl saved from bursting into flames by the humidity. As my word day ended lady luck smiled and my bus was at the stop outside my office. Air conditioned office across shaded foyer to air conditioned bus. When I got off of the bus near home I thought I'd made my right turn along the pavement a little to sharpish and got a tad too close to the bus engine or exhaust. Then the bus drove away and the temperature stayed the same. Fuck this, I thought. Proper hot.

Of course, what with Brisbane having just been underwater and category 5 cyclone Yasi looking as though it may smash the absolute crap out of Cairns and possibly most of coastal North Queensland, I guess I mustn't grumble. But I'm still feeling a bit groggy from the cold and a little grumpy. By my standards of grumpy. Which makes me intolerably grumpy when judged by the standards of most others. Chest seems far clearer today as the remaining muck seems to have migrated north and is coming once again from my nose. Sleeping in the airconed lounge is not exactly helping but is preferable to enduring the heat; last night it didn't drop much below 30 degrees centigrade outside while the thermometer in AJ's room was reading 28. The dogs grudgingly came out for a walk this morning and I'm sure they will spend the best part of today doing absolutely bugger all.

Alex did her usual cry out at about 02:00. If ignored she goes back to sleep; I'm not convinced she is waking up in the wee small hours but at 4 she was definitely awake and had some milk before not falling back to sleep. I told her she could come out of her bedroom and sleep on the lounge floor next to me. She seemed to misinterpret this and instead decided to sleep on top of me, something I'd not have previously thought possible. I was laying on my front, head on hands. She somehow managed to wedge a knee between my head and shoulder and drape herself over me, resting on my back with an arm draped over my head. She seemed far more comfortable than I was, and although it was very cute I'm glad she soon rolled off of dad and came to rest on the floor, wedged between my makeshift bed and the sofa.

At 5 we got up and I checked the Bureau of Meteorology website, something I do every day before invariably deciding the weather is right for shorts and t-shirts. Optus have again managed to fuck up our internet connection. Another 12hours offline. Considering we have cable internet, which as far as I am aware means there is a fucking cable running from my house to the internet, this is some achievement for a big, grown-up ISP. Mind you, I guess we do live in the backwaters of about-8km-from-the-very-centre-of-Sydney. So completely unimpressed with their piss-poor service. So I checked the weather on my android phone, which is on an Optus plan. So Optus can maintain a wireless internet infrastructure, which as far as I can tell works by magic, but not one that is plugged in. Genius. Having found no connection last night we called the tech support line and were put into a 20minute long (their guesstimate) queue after being told the weather was responsible for some service disruptions. Really? If I was under 20ft of water in Brisbane or watching telegraph poles being ripped from the ground in Cairns I might swallow that, but in Sydney it has been a bit muggy and warm for a few days.

Can't wait to get home to see if I have internet tonight. Actually, I just can't wait to get home; having a shithouse day and really do not feel like being at work today or ever again.

I just checked the weather again. Sub-30 here in Sydney, but the gathering storm up north looks like a bastard. Mandatory evacuations, evacuation centres full. Get out now was the call; it may be too late to get out. Hunker down. Some reports are saying it could still be a cyclone even when it gets 500km inland. It's a monster and that means the chances of not being in its path are low. I'm trying to imagine just how fucking scary this is going to be. Sal and I copped the tail of a hurricane Ivan a couple of days before we nearly-didn't-get-married-because-of-a-hurricane, back in 2004 in Curacao. It came to very little, but it was interesting to see the hurried activities of the locals as they moved people and property away from the waters edge and started to lock-down the island. I look forward to the morning's news with a morbid fascination. Fuck the property, to hell with the money, I hope the people are safe.