After my selfish use of a full day last Friday I thought I should give my family a day so we had a family day last Saturday, run the dogs and Kaydee down the track etc. I also was keeping a close eye on the weather, as the water tank only had 6 inches left (less than a weeks supply before the dregs begin to thicken the water and crap out the tap washers filling the drinking water filters etc), and this is the only house water we have. We do have a ground water spear pump with a continuous supply from the more than +56 meters of fine white sand beneath us. The water is not saline but very acidic, and it's only good use is emergency garden watering and house cleaning. Enough of that.
With the prospect of "some rain" over Sunday. I stayed off the treadly
to make sure any rain we got made it into our tank, the gutters can get blocked at the run off to the tank as well as at the sieve on the top of the tank. If we get a burst of rain after a long dry any and all debris will find its way to these points. The reason: it is next to impossible to completely clean the gutters and the entire surface area of the roof of every single leaf and stick. This problem is most noticeable during the storm season when the rain usually comes with high winds. I did not want to lose a drop of water with the tank being so low, Joy-ann and I had already decided to ring for the delivery of 1000 gallons on the Monday, giving in as it were.
So Sunday was spent going out in the showers removing any build-up of debris as the light rain was falling, it was windy. Joy-ann and Kaydee had gone up the coast to South Tweed. By 3:00pm there was already another 30 cm in the tank, but the rain got heavier and by 10:00pm the tank was ½ filled, I had also managed to get a sack of "dynamic lifter" spread around the fruit trees, so it was a good call to stay home.... or was it.
As it turned out the rain didn't stop overnight and continued throughout Monday, showering on and off. This meant performing the same vigil, during the times I was waiting to clear the gutters I wrote a couple of scripts for this "Wordpress blogger" to allow easier image manipulation, more on that later.
By 4:00pm on Monday 67mm of rain had fallen on the roof and the tank was finally overflowing and it could stop raining now. So I thought I'll be able to ride to my next dentist appointment tomorrow at 10:30am and went to bed for the first time in a month not hoping for rain tomorrow.
How things can change! By the morning the rain had bucketed down all night the wind was building quickly and around 8:00am it was up to 60km with gusts stronger, I wasn't even sure I would be able to make it to Sextons Hill in a car let alone with me as the motor. So I "piked out" on the ride to the dentist and drove, slowly, to the dental surgery. As it was I needed to stop and pull large fallen branches from the road on the way to the freeway and only felt safe driving at 80km/hr on the freeway only the b-double trucks were ignoring the conditions.
If I had ridden my bike I reckon I would of broken my "on the flat speed record" with the tail wind. Unfortunately I might of not been able to turn the crank when I was heading into it's teeth.
Tomorrows another day!
Here is an example of what I was taking about, (thanks Chris for making this beautiful photograph public, it links to your recent crazyguyonabike Scotland tour journal ps:let me know if you want it removed)
Here is the idea of one of the "wordpress plugins": Upload an image from another website and use it to link to that site with a click of a button rather than lots of coding, downloading and uploading etc
The other "wordpress plugin": is used to download dynamic wind data from the BOM and create a graph, upload it and attach it to the post as in the graph above.
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