Public holiday today for Australia Day and lo, there was much rejoicing.

Or there would have been if the significant proportion of the population on the east coast of Australia hadn't spent the day either:
a) cleaning up after floods and tornados;
b) smack bang in the middle of floods and tornados; or
c) battening down the hatches in preparation for floods and tornados.

Didn't get a wink of sleep as the house I'm in is - to put it politely - dodgy and has problems with leaking and flooding of the kitchen, laundry, bathroom, dining etc. If there's so much as a standard storm front passing over, the rain starts pouring in and the kitchen floor is underwater in no time.

In the 6pm-midnight time slot, I very industriously moved anything sharp, heavy, pointy, or not securely nailed down from the backyard. I pressed every stockpot, soup tureen, bucket, vase and large tupperware container into use, positioning them under the areas where grim experience has taught me the roof and light fittings most commonly leak, in anticipation. Almost every sheet and towel in the house at the ready. Broom on standby to push water away from whitegoods and out the back door into the yard. Masking tape at the ready, just in case the predicted winds are truly wild and woolly and I need to tape up the glass panes in the windows. Torch. Candles. Matches. Important paperwork, ID and a change of clothes in a bag near the front door, in case the leaking light fittings set the house on fire. This done, I'm ready to roll.#

In the midnight to 6am time slot* (when the one-in-fifty-year event was predicted to descend on Sydney) I lay down and waited.

All night. And to be honest, in the end I'd say it could have been much worse. It was almost feeble. But Sydney got off pretty lightly compared with Queensland, which as always bore the brunt of it.

But possibly even Queensland didn't get hit as badly as it had been in 2011. That year the floods set a new benchmark in devastation. I think it's best summed up if I note that the floods were so widespread and so much excess water was around that bull sharks were seen swimming through the drive-through at McDonald's, about 30 kilometres away from the coast.

This year, nothing like that has been reported (thus far). The best that I've heard is about jellyfish being found in people's backyards in Redcliffe (Brisbane, Queensland). I grant you, it hasn't been a good flood - aside from the umpteen thousand houses flood-damaged, the entire telecommunications network went down across the state, and is (at time of blipping, nearly 4 days later) only partially restored in certain areas and not at all in others. And there are a few people my family knows who are presently Missing In Action. But they'll turn up. They usually do. :-)

The photo of the patty cakes is a token nod to the public holiday. I was kind of busy and didn't fret about hunting for something that more accurately represented the day's activities.

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# I am a Child of the Queensland Tropics. We were trained from an early age (Ähhh, grasshopper!") in the gentle art of battling the elements during the cyclone season, every year. I am not a paranoid survivalist nutter. I have no Spam in my pantry and there is no bunker underneath the house.
* Yes, I'm backblipping and technically the midnight-6am bit is the next day.