Cabin Fever

An even rainier week!

To see just how rainy, check out this video our friends Steffan and Iris took (from their blog vos2oz.com). The first half of this video shows what is normally a very small, placid creek on their property. The second half shows the adventure that driving to Lismore has become!

My grand plans for getting ahead on the garden have been stymied by the continual downpour. Even most indoor work is impossible because the wooden structure of the house is too wet. Looking on the bright side, it has enforced a degree of rest over the first couple of weeks with the new baby, which is probably a good thing - especially for C.
When we have gone out, it has been indoors - we've spent a fair amount of time at the Rainbow cafe.
Given that our tumble dryer died, and the rain has been more or less constant, the most rock and roll element of my lifestyle has been the daring early morning trips to the laundrette. In order to keep up with the demand for clean, dry nappies and bunny rugs, I've been driving through knee-deep water to the village and back whenever we've got behind on the nappies. The guy at the Spin Cycle shop in Lismore promised us he would be able to fix our tumble dryer this week, but when we drove into town on Wednesday to drop it off, we found that he had extended his Xmas holiday. These small details can really change the shape of your week. And lose you someone's business.

As the four of us have been experiencing slight cabin-fever, cooped up in our house, we have avoided driving straight home from the village a few times, and today we took a 10 minute detour up Gungas Road to take a look at the normally peaceable small creek that runs though Steffan's yard. Not only had the creek been transformed into a eight metre wide torrent, but there are waterfalls falling directly onto Gungas Road itself, and Gungas Road is cut off to all but the ruggedest all terrain vehicles at the point where it fords the creek to go up the hill. its a bit of an adventure in the rainforest right now.

New Person!

Our big news this week is that C is pregnant.
The new person is due to arrive in mid/late December, and she's a little girl. She doesn't have a name yet, but she does have a working title - Lil (as in "lil girl").
We said hello to her image on the scanner (darkly) last week, and she was pretty shy, but we still got a good look at her sleeping face before she hid from the camera completely. Figuring the dates, we're fairly sure she was made in New Zealand, during our trip to Bas and Jo's wedding on South Island.
Much of our time has been taken up getting ahead on the baby-kit. Four months out might seem a bit early to be buying a cot, a car-restraint, and a jogger - but the price and choice we've got in Brisbane is many times better than around Nimbin, so we should save ourselves hassle by stocking up on all the essentials right now, during our remaining few weeks in the city.
We drove down to Nimbin for the weekend, partly to deliver some of the bulkier items home before we had more than would fit in our little Barina, and partly because we were starting to really miss the place... And now I'm back in the city I'm suddenly very sad that I'm not down there to stay for another 2 months or so, and suddenly aware of all the ways city life compresses and distorts my priorities and personality.
C's job is plodding on, both my jobs are plodding on, and I'm still appreciating the extra time at home and away from the psychologically toxic office environment - it's making me more anti-social, but also saner. As C put it - now we've seen outside of the rat-race, we're very keen to get out as far as possible.
I had a strange working-from-home moment today. I lit the gas stove-top to make myself some rice for lunch. I was wearing a cotton/nylon jumper. As I lit the stove, the flame jumped inexplicably, about 50cm to my chest, and the front of my jumper was suddenly on fire. It was not hot - a cool, yellowish flame, standing in the air about 1cm above the surface of the jumper. I stepped back, well away from the stove, and tried to smother the flames with my arms - with the result that the flames jumped onto the arms of my jumper, which gave me a better view of them - small, yellow, not very hot. It's hard to smother your arms with any other part of the body, so I took the jumper off and sat on it. After a moment the flames went out, and I examined the jumper - not a mark on it, and seemingly good as new, though it did make a crackling, static-electricity type noise as I took it off. I googled for the phenomenon and came up with nothing.