Here Comes the Rain Again

Adam says it's falling on my head like a memory:


...or maybe it's falling on my head like a new emotion?

Well, this makes 2 years in a row without summer here in Canberra. Last summer we had more than 500mm of rain and lots of flooding in the area. This summer has not been much better. The weather radar has regularly looked something like this:

Well, either like the above - large bands of rain, or with smaller, more intense, heavy storm fronts coming through. The upshot is that summer this year featured over 370mm (14.5 inches) of rain near us. And coming into autumn, things haven't improved.

The news and media have been full of warnings about the slow moving front currently spread across most of New South Wales. It's brought heavy rain for the last week. 

Tues 41.2mm (1.62 inches)

Wed 84.2mm (3.31 inches)

Thu  41.8mm (1.65 inches)

Fri      0.8mm

Sat   87.6mm (3.45 inches)

The average rainfall for the entire month of March is only 39.2mm (1.54 inches). The rain has now settled down to occasional showers, but the ground is waterlogged, all the surrounding rivers have broken their banks, and there are many towns being evacuated from floodwaters. We managed to survive reasonably well, with a bit of underhouse water that was kept at bay by some sandbagging I did on Thursday morning (and thanks to Heavenly Father answering prayers) :)

We've taken a couple of opportunities to take the kids around for a look at the rivers and flooding.

Below are photos from Point Hut Crossing , approx 1.6kms (1 mile) from our home, on the Thursday morning. Murrumbidgee River crosses under a floodway bridge here. The water reached higher than this - I saw it at least at the "Road Subject to Flooding" sign at one point.

Watching a tree float past in the floodwaters

The bridge is under there, somewhere. The 2 metre depth marker above the bridge is completely submerged.

Spillway from Point Hut Pond

Went down to Tharwa on Sunday afternoon, a small village a further 7km up stream from Point Hut. Tharwa are lucky in that their main bridge into town has only just been renovated. The first photo shows what their bridge looked like 2.5yrs ago. Note the water level in comparison to the support pylons. The second photo shows the bridge as of Sunday - the water is already higher than the bottom "window" in the pylons.

Tharwa Bridge and Murrumbidgee River  - Aug 09

Tharwa Bridge and Murrumbidgee River - Mar 12

Saving the Crops From the Rain

Adam swims for his life:

The  Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting heavy rain and flooding for the next couple of days - last thing we need given that our house still hasn't been repaired, and the ongoing issues with our neighbor about water runoff. They say that some areas are likely to receive up to 300mm of rain (that's a foot for the metric-impaired) in that period.

The significant summer rains have been a dual edged sword on our garden - instead of everything being dead in the heat, its' green and jungle-like. Our vegetable patch has been taking off - lots of tomatoes, picked our first pumpkin the other day, several zucchinis and more growing. Unfortunately, the excessive rain is also causing issues - a lot of it has been rotting before we can get to it.

We sent Seth out to try and pick many of the ripe tomatoes from around the various garden beds - I've spent this evening cutting many of them up and putting them into the dehydrator. I went with him and picked some of our corn - I have no idea how to know when it's ripe, but the bugs were starting to get to them - I also didn't want it rotting in the rain, which I've seen happen.

After picking several ears, I opened them up and got quite a surprise - turns out Elissa actually planted several different corn types. The usual yellow sweet corn was a bit patchy, but the exotic corns had done quite well ...

Figure we'll cook them up tomorrow night and see how they taste :)

GWS Giants Members 2012

Adam thinks big:

Our GWS Giants memberships packages for 2012 came in the mail today.

Jayde , Seth and I received membership cards, lanyards, keychains, car stickers, a lunch box, fridge magnets, a mini-football and vouchers for each of us to pickup a Giants cap from the merchandising stand at the next home game we attend.

We also get entry to all of the Giants games played in Canberra this year. With any luck, we may even catch a game up in Sydney. Unfortunately there's not much chance of getting to see our beloved West Coast at all this year :(

Star Wars Parenting MormonAd

Adam laughs:

Found this take-off of a MormonAd, and thought it was worthy of sharing ...

Unfortunately the "Funny MormonAds" website it's advertising doesn't appear to be functional ...

Church, Chocolate and the National Multicultural Festival

Adam notes:

It was Stake Conference at Church two weeks ago. We have a tradition where Elissa usually goes to the Saturday night session whilst I look after the kids. With Sky and her mum staying with us over that weekend, they offered to babysit for us whilst we attended together, so we had the rare treat of being able to go out to Conference together, and then out on a mini-date afterwards.

The National Multicultural Festival was on, so after Conference we headed into Civic and wandered around Gareema Place amongst the teeming hordes. There were over a hundred stalls featuring food from and drinks from around the globe. The city centre was jam packed - wall-to-wall people, the festival was obviously "the place to be". The crowded atmosphere was reinforced by stages playing live music adding to the noisy and chaotic atmosphere.

We ended up sampling a number of different foods.

• Loukomades (Deep Fried Dough balls soaked in Honey) from a Greek stall
• Hoi Mang Poo Tod (Fried Mussell and Bean Sprout Pancake) from a Thai stall
• Mango, Coconut and Sago drink from one of the Asian stalls

And we finished it all off with dessert at Koko Black - a dedicated chocolate restaurant.

We shared a "Summer Spoil" consisting of a blackberry torte, strawberry jube, chocolate mousse with crushed pistachios, chocolate-raspberry sorbet and two chocolates — milk raspberry ganache

and cassis. To wash it all down, Elissa had a Chili infused Hot Chocolate, whilst I had the Iced Chocolate infused with Blood Orange. Everything was incredibly rich - the drinks were quite literally liquid chocolate. 

Possibly the first time in our lives we've ever thought "too much chocolate" ... but only for a moment  :)

It was fun evening and we appreciated being able to go out together.

Fred - The Younger Years

Adam posts a joke that most readers probably won't get:

Star Wars + Lego + PC = Obsession

Adam geeks Seth out:

Get three cool geek icons and stick them together - Lego, Star Wars and a Computer, and what do you get .... Seth. His world has pretty much revolved around these three things recently.

For Christmas, he got the Lego Star Wars PC game, which all of the kids really like. It's become the number one request choice to play when they're allowed on the computer.

Both Seth and Jayde came with me on the 10th Feb to see The Phantom Menace in 3D at the cinema. It was the first time they'd seen any of the Star Wars movies at the cinema, so even though it was one of the weaker movies, they thoroughly loved it. I would've preferred if they'd had done the original Star Wars (Ep IV A New Hope) as the first 3D movie.

Of course, all of the elements have kind of blurred together. Seth's Lego building has recently taken on the form of building lots of custom Podracers, like those in the Phantom Menace.

His drawings have also started featuring customised Lego Star Wars Minifigures.

Valentine's Day 2012

Adam does a Pepe Le Pew impression:

Valentine's Day - the day of commercial love.

Elissa created a home made card for Adam, featuring packets of Lego Minifigures, which was her present for Adam.

Adam's card for Elissa - her present was to become a Founding Member of The Piano Guys Club. This gets her a copy of their CD which is something that she's been wanting for a little while.

Adam brought home flowers after work - a single rose for Elissa, and several flowers each for both Jayde and Jewel.

Sky was staying with us at this point, so she babysat for us whilst we went out for dinner. We ended up going out to the Indian Affair restaurant in Phillip, where we had a delicious meal and spent the evening talking.

Sky Has Been and Gone But .... She'll Be Back

Adam remembers to update:

We've played host again to somebody looking for accommodation in Canberra. Sky Van Beek is a young lady in her 20's who has just moved down from northern NSW to take up work down here in Canberra. She arrived with us on the 10th  to try and find some permanent accommodation and moved out on the 19th, having found a share house nearby.

Sky was only baptised early last month, and we've enjoyed having her around, being able to invite her up for our morning scripture study and prayers with the kids, as well having Family Home Evening with us. Sky even decided to get up and sit in on Seminary during the week - she is enjoying learning more about the Gospel.

When she first came down, her mum came down to stay for the first weekend as well. We discovered that her mum was from Perth and knew some of the people that we did - as always, it's a small world.

Even though Sky has now moved out, she'll still be in the same Ward as us at Church, plus we've got a standing invitation for her to come for dinner and Family Home Evenings on Monday nights, so we're hoping that we'll be seeing a lot more of Sky in the future.

The Good, The Bad and the Burley - Narooma Fishing Charter

Adam fails to throw up:

I went down with a bunch of friends from Church on a Chartered Fishing Trip yesterday.
The charter was out of Narooma, so I drove myself and two others down on Friday evening (through heavy thunderstorms and torrential rain I might add) to Narooma where we stayed at a motel overnight.

We left Narooma Wharf at 6AM on the Saturday morning on the 40 foot boat, Dreamtime.  All up, there were 9 of us onboard (myself, John Harwood, Tim Kolonihea, Morgan Taylor, Ben Stuart, Steve Wilson, Evan Harvey, Ryan Heslehurst and Jacob Fell - we had also had 2 others cancel due to sickness), as well as the skipper and deckhand.

 It was still dark when we left - we got to enjoy seeing the sunrise over the ocean as we ventured out.

It was a fun day, although it started out tough for me. After being out for an hour or sea, I could feel myself getting seasick. I took some seasickness tablets, but kept getting more nauseous, I was joking though that I would be the first one to throw up - no one else was feeling sick. The tablets caused me to be rather drowsy, and by about 10:30, I found a spot underneath the ladder to the upperdeck and fell asleep. I woke up about half an hour later to the sound of Evan throwing up. Woohoo, I wasn't the first to throw up! (... and didn't end up throwing up at all, whilst Evan lay on a bench for the remainder of the day)

In fact, after waking up, the sea sickness was gone, although I had to deal with bits of my body having lost circulation or being rather sore ... sleeping huddled up under a ladder on a ship's deck does not lend itself to natural sleeping positions.

I got more into the hang of things now that the seasickness had left. Throughout the rest of the afternoon I managed to land the following fish. One King Fish (thrown back - only about 50cm long - min size is 65cms), 3 Rubberlipped Murwongs (filleted and currently sitting in our fridge/freezer for Elissa), a Sergeant Baker (kept for bait), a Red Perch (undersize - thrown back) and a baitfish of some type (herring?) - that funnily enough was kept for bait. I did manage to get another couple of fish close to the surface or even out of the water, but didn't manage to land them into the boat.

Everyone else did quite well too - we ended up with about 70 fish kept in total (21 King Fish, over 40 Murwongs, 4 flathead, a snapper and a mangrove jack.) There were probably just as many fish thrown back for being undersize or too dangerous to keep on board (eg Scorpionfish - fine for eating, but lots of venemous spikes - we caught lots of these).

The actual day was spent moving around lots of different locations outside of Narooma and near Montague Island (about 9kms off shore), initially getting baitfish, and subsequently chasing different schools of fish about. Early in the morning there were practically flotillas about the various schools. At one point I counted over 20 other boats around us.

We also had to contend with a number of seals about, who apparently are quite keen on stealing fish that are being reeled in, although we kept away from any seal groups that were in the water.

All up we spent 9 hours on the boat, at which point we came back to land, cleaned and gutted the fish, and divided up the spoils. (Thanks to all the gents who did that - I had no idea how to do any of it, so left it in the capable hands of the experts.) It was funny at the fish cleaning station - it was next to a shallow inlet, into which the fish offal was washed into. Whilst we were there pelicans were fighting over the scraps, however they all got out of the way when several sting rays decided they'd come in and investigate to see what the fish carcasses tasted like.

We (John H, Tim K and myself) managed to fit two eskys and a bag full of fish and ice into the rear of our new car - or to be more accurate - 1 bag and 1 esky full of fillets and whole fish, and 1 esky full of "frames" ie - the fish carcasses that have been filleted. Tim, in typical Polynesian fashion, was looking forward to the fish heads and carcass as a meal in themselves - ugh! Funnily enough all the white boys weren't overly interested in them and he was able to bring an entire esky full of them home. Now the fan part was going to be driving home 3 hours up Clyde Mountain with all those eskies and bag full of melting ice mixed with fish juices and to successfully not get any fishy smell into our new car. I'm glad to say we were able to do it successfully.

We got home tired, sunburnt, fishy smelling and dehydrated, but having enjoyed our trip away, even if we didn't catch any Gooberfish.