If you ever need a downpour, you should invite us around. Freak rain events seem to haunt us, arriving at the most inconvenient of times;-our wedding day in the middle of an otherwise record breaking summer, walking to the car with our first born on our way home from the hospital without an umbrella, the three months worth in three days on the weekend that we packed our container to move from Melbourne. It even seems to be following us now to the Sunshine State😊.
In a modest but out-of-the-norm wet couple of days, which has seen us receive 80mls+ of rain, our water courses are all flowing like mini rapids again. The wet season here has extended longer than normal this year, and whilst we certainly don’t want to moan about having too much water when so many in our great land are in drought, it is beginning to be a cause for concern.
Ignoring all the significant days that unusually timed rain has impacted us in the past, rain often just meant ‘grab an umbrella before you leave the house’, or ‘we might have to postpone our beach trip until the rain stops’. At the moment, rain and weather forecasts have a much greater significance to our lives, dictating what work we can be doing and with what equipment, how long a job takes, and, crucially, how much our bodies might ache afterwards. It also dictates whether our grassed areas look cut and cared for, or overgrown and wild.
For our development, unrelenting rain means timelines are constantly stretching and lengthening. We are fortunate in that there are still lots of jobs that can be done either in spite of or out in the rain. We’ve never been busier. But in the next few weeks as we look to putting in roads and starting our building works, it’d be really nice if the rain could bypass us and go to some of those areas that are in much more need of it. The tractor really can lift a lot more than I can.
In the meantime, I remember the quote that says when it rains look for rainbows...and we also get to look for waterfalls off the mountain and top up our tanks, so it’s not all bad!
