So much rain!

Can you see the horizontal tree trunk in the background? That's the dead tree that came down in the storm. There's a kookaburra sitting on the chicken run fence enjoying the rain and waiting for an unsuspecting lizard or snake to scamper by.

 After 20 months of drought, it was wonderful seeing this rainwater pooling up in the backyard.

It's been quite a night here. The rain depression, which was the remnants of TC Debbie, brought an incredible amount of rain over the past 36 hours and wind for the past 12 hours.  In our town we had 9 inches/230mm of rain which has resulted in flash flooding and major floods further down the coast. We have a tree down in the backyard and the power lines came down out the front at about 4pm yesterday. It's still down but we haven't lost power. I guess we're on a long list of problems to be dealt with by Energex later in the day.  Our phones and internet were out over night. The phones are back now but the internet is still down.  I'm using the hotspot on my phone to make this post.  The good news is that we and our family are fine. I think Hanno and I can deal with the tree in the backyard and will tackle that later this morning. If it's too much for us we'll ask our family for help. Gracie loved the rain. She ran around in the backyard getting soaked to the skin and when I let her inside, even after I towelled her dry, it took hours for her hair to dry out properly.

This was taken about 2pm yesterday afternoon.

And right in the middle of this photo, with the rain pouring down, is a sulphur-crested cockatoo feasting on our pecans.  He was joined by a friend later and the two of them filled up on nuts before they flew off.

I hoping everyone up north and down in the flooded areas in NSW are coping. It will be a big job cleaning up but as long as we're all unharmed, we can get on with the clean up.

I apologise for having to spend so much time on this template but the good news is that I'm very happy with this new one. I've tested it using the desktop, laptop, phone and tablet and it looks like it's working well on all of them.  I still have a few things to read about and change, I want to tweak the colours, but the bulk of the work is done and you should be able to read everything while I work on finalising the smaller things. Thanks for your patience.

It will be a busy day here with the clean up outside and baking Jamie's birthday cake. His birthday party is tomorrow and I'll rest on Sunday.  And that leaves time for me to get back into the swing of things here and write a, hopefully, interesting post for you on Monday.  Stay tuned, friends.