Tuesday 30 November 2010

Floods...

We had 142mm of rain from Thursday night until Sunday evening! Yikes!! That is 568 points or 5.68" of rain in the old currency.

Saturday was Election Day (State Elections, don't talk to me about it - very sad face) and The Sweetheart and I went in to The Maine to vote, had a Proper Cooked Breakfast at Togs (yummo!) and then decided to go look at the spillway at the northern end of Cairn Curran Reservoir.
Cairn Curran has been dry for years, and in the last two months has gone from empty to OVERFULL on Saturday!
There is a great pic here of the dry lake bed, and Crikey has a bit written last week (they should have been here this week!!!).
Saturday when we got to the spillway we were met with all sorts of flashing lights - CFA, SES and Police - the dam was overfull and the sluice gates were being opened. The land below the dam wall was about to be flooded by the Loddon River water - and continues to head north towards the Murray River, wetting all sorts of towns, farms, houses and flooding roads on it's way.




Here is my dam on Saturday morning - the most water it has had in it in EIGHT years!











And here is my dam later on Saturday when it overflowed!












 The Loddon at Newstead got too big for it's banks and fell out all over the road and paddocks.

The highway was also blocked half way back into Castlemaine at Muckleford Creek until yesterday (Monday). The woman who owns the store and lives over the river took an hour to get to work on Sunday - via Franklinford, Castlemaine and Maldon!



A lot of people - far too many actually - tried to drive through flooded roads and got stuck. Or worse - swept away. Fortunately, nobody went missing but just caused a nuisance for the Police, SES, CFA etc who had to haul them out. Or leave them there....


 Coming home on Saturday from not seeing the spillway spilling we discovered our road was being washed out. All pretty scary really - we weren't in the big deal 4WD but in the very low to the ground 944, aaaghhh!!!


The water was rushing across the road on the left, down from the hill as well as rising up from the creek on the left hand side. The water on the right was coming down faster than it could get through the wire fence!

Friday 12 November 2010

14.13 on 12.11.10

Oh bollocks! It clicked over to 14.14 as I hit 'publish blog'.
Sigh.
Never mind - there is always next year when I can blog at 15.14 on 13.12.11
I will start earlier.

Friday Funny

Every so often a lovely romantic song comes along that just grabs ya right where you need to be grabbed...
(this one probably aint it however)

Thursday 4 November 2010

Sewing, sewing, sewing!!!

Here is a wiki page with all the secrets of international sizing exposed!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EN_13402

I have been hunting out lots of different patterns for summer clothes - including what to wear to the Porsche Club Ball next month.

I am rather leaning towards this Butterick Retro with it's big flowy skirt and long wide wrap-around waist ties:
http://butterick.mccall.com/b4919-products-5273.php?page_id=152
You will have to go and look at it - can't seem to be able to whip an image from the site (but then I AM using the tiny notebook which is so small it hasn't learned to do some things...!).

And then I discovered this site:
http://m-sewing.com/
So very many FREE downloadable patterns there for just about everything you could desire to sew. Women's, men's, girls' and boy's patterns and everything from underwear to raincoats!
You possibly wont hear from me for a while...

Monday 1 November 2010

Stephen Fry does it for me!

I do love Stephen Fry.

QI is one of the highlights of the television week, and it is all for his quick wit and erudite ramblings - love how his mind can whirl and twirl and land back on it's feet in the right place!
He recently came to Australia and gave performances in Sydney (filled the Opera House) and Melbourne.
The Sydney performance was shown as a snappy hour long tv show. Seemingly without edits. A great joy to see. Wish I had been able to go to his show. Or both of them would have been greedy but wonderful. Like second helpings of something with truffles...


Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.