The rain

Just incase you were thinking it's -always- sunny, here's a blog drained with todays weather. We woke up with rain. HEAVY rain also known as "flash floods".

It rained on and off all throughout the day and as I'm writing this post (on my saturday morning) it's raining again.

As an example of how special this kind of rain is here these days: Some of our friends here have children. About 2 months ago the same happened. One couple went outside with their little 3 year old girl to show them what this kind of rain was. Another couple video-taped it for their 1 year old boy.

I reckon that in The NL young parents will soon have to start video-taping sunny moments (and maybe also snow) for their young children ;-P

Rain can also make for nice photo's.

Close-up of the water falling into the tank.

The garden in the rain.

The path to our flat in the rain.

Infront of our flat in the rain.

The drive way in the rain.

And then we had an emergency... Rain was comming down so hard that the somewhat blocked gutter couldn't get rid of it anymore and it started pouring onto our window. Because there's a small roof over the windows to protect rain from entering I had just opened one to get the beautifull fresh air inside. If you have the window open, the water doesn't get ON your window anymore but it goes INside. That's right, splattering on the table onto my papers some 20cm next to my brand new computer.

Luckily the computer is unharmed but the papers needed to dry.

We will have to prevend this because you never know when a gutter is blocked up. Something can start blocking it even right after you cleaned it.

So, all this happened in the morning and in the afternoon routine picked up again: SHOPPING!!!!

. We went to Big W to return a toaster that we bought the day before because it was broken. This is the Arndale shopping centre entrance. (picture taken with my mobile phone so everything is crooked again)

In the evening we were driving Karin and gavin to their dinner with colleagues and they had a different rainy surprise. All over Adelaide (drink)water pipes had burst because the sand around them went from super dry to super wet. Aparently this means something, don't ask me. Luckily for Karin and Gavin the mains waterpipe infront of their house only broke a little bit. We all know what nice fountains broken pipes can make, not to mention sink holes!

It took the watercompany about 4 hours to get someone down here to fix it. With the waterrestrictions on this was a HUGE waste of water. Gavin made a little detour for the water so it went over the grass. Everybody in their street came by to fill up buckets to water their gardens, lawns and trees.

After dropping them off we went to Harvey Norman where we want to buy a TV. First we wanted to buy a tiny LCD TV for a mere $299 but it looks like we're going to end up with a model a fair bit more expensive but it will be able to show Ultra High Definition pictures. Let me explain about this.

In Australia you can receive 4 kinds of signals for your tellie these days:
- Analogue
- Digital Standard Definition (SD)
- Digital High Definition (HD)
- Digital Ultra High Definition (Ultra HD)

Analogue is going to be phased out so everybody will have to buy a setop box or a new TV to receive Digital SD TV. All digital is looking better than analogue + it is widescreen.

Also: whatever is broadcasted in SD is also (by law) broadcasted in HD.

Ultra HD is basically normal HD but on a much higher resolution to match those supersized LCD and plasma screens. And some broadcasters have created special Ultra HD channels where they show different stuff (mainly movies and sports events) from their "normal" HD or SD channel.


In the evening at home Nic didn't want to be photographed.

Twice.

Also to show you that not everything is better or nicer here, here are 2 pictures of (mosquito?) bites on my leg. They itch like HELL sometimes, especially when they're tsjp tsjtsjtsjptsjp tsjptsjp fressshhh and they make lovely little tattoos for about 2 weeks. This is my left leg.

This is my right leg.

After picking up Karin and Gav and dropping them off home again we drove around a bit and saw some amazing christmas decorations. Some people go nuts here with decorating their houses.

It's like a bloody funfair!