Torrential rain last weekend
Yes, I’m posting this a bit late. None the less, last Saturday we had quite a significant downpour. First of all, I took the train out to Camberwell and noticed I was heading into dark storm clouds, it was just obvious that a storm was going to breakout though I didn’t realise how soon. Received an sms from a friend I was meeting saying the weather is terrible, yet got off the train and didn’t feel like the storm was going to hit all that soon. None the less, it hit when I was as far from shelter as possible. Well okay that wasn’t really much more than 50 metres or so but it was raining heavily enough that it was enough to get drenched. I caught some shelter then dashed for the Burke Road shops. I probably choose the worst time to cross Burke Road and that is when I got drenched the most as the wind was blowing the rain horizontally and the rain was at it’s heaviest. Even still, it was warm enough that it didn’t take long dry out.
On the way back, heading down Canterbury Rd in the car, the road was just about flooded in places, with streams of water either side and anywhere that the road was low there was water right across it, being sprayed into the air as cars went past. Closer to home the the stream the side of the road was so massive that there were just about some little mini cascades in places and the water was brown from picking up clay and silt. Fortunately, when we got to the front of my house it appeared as though the drainage was a little better and the road wasn’t flooded. Though again I must have chosen the worst time to dash for the house. As I stepped over the gutter it had become a raging current, while just inside the gate the footpath was all flooded with no way around it.
Fortunately with the way the land lines, our property doesn’t flood too much. Though due to some design issues with the house, a little bit of water does seep in through the pit (seating area with fireplace). A little bit also came in near the kitchen window. This is essentially because a massive amount of water flows off a valley in the roof and then the excess water that doesn’t make it into the down-pipe flows under the house.
Though the worst of it became apparent until a day or two later. On Sunday the phone line had become a little crackly and by Monday it wasn’t working at all. Strangely enough the ADSL was still working while the phone was completely dead, rather ironic when Telstra makes you have an active phone line for ADSL, yet it doesn’t even need to be working for the ADSL to work. So Telstra came out to test the line, finding that the fault was probably on our premises. In the one hour that I was actually out of the house on Wednesday they came and left a note to say we had missed them. Fortunately mum had called up our phone provider (AAPT) to see if it had been fixed and arranged for another Telstra tech to come the next day. Turns out it was the extension going to the kitchen that was causing problems, possibly dangling in the mud. The tech disconnected it until we can get someone out to run a new cable. Fortunately it wasn’t much to relocate the cordless phone to the first socket on the line.
So that’s that, by around midday Thursday, we finally had a working phone line.