Clean up

Well, that was distracting.

I was doing pretty well until Alfred turned up.

I wrote about tweaking my workflow a little while ago—getting some real extra productivity out of my new dictation set up. Surprising how quickly that fell apart in the teeth of a cyclone. Not that it was much of a cyclone, really. More of a weird omni-storm that rolled in late and outstayed its welcome.

Around 11:30 on Saturday night, Thomas woke me up to tell me there was a leak in the hallway just outside our bedroom. And he wasn’t wrong.

The wind had spooled up to about 80 or 90 kilometers an hour by that point, with gusts maybe half again as fast. I was listening for the telltale sound of corrugated iron coming loose, but there was nothing—just wind and rain. Loud, but oddly reassuring. I figured if the house was going to come apart around us, it would probably make a bit more noise.

Turned out, the high-speed wind from the east had blasted a ton of water into an air vent on the roof—one that wasn’t designed to fend off a horizontal attack like that. The water found its way into the ceiling, reached a smoke detector, shorted that out, and took down the lighting circuit for most of the house. And then, of course, it started pouring down into the hallway.

I’d been lying in bed with my noise-canceling headphones on, eye mask in place, trying to pretend I wasn’t wide awake in the middle of a storm. And honestly, I was doing a pretty good job of it. Until I had to get up, find buckets and towels, and deal with the mess.

So there we were, sitting in the dark, wondering if the house was about to come apart. It didn’t. Not even close. But the next morning was a different story—plenty of cleanup to do, and no lights for a couple of days. Still, we got off lightly compared to a lot of people, some of whom are still without power.

Last night, we headed over to my mother’s place to help clean up. She’d taken on a lot more water under the house than we had through the roof. Jane and Thomas came with me, which I was grateful for—it had taken me two and a half hours to lock mum’s place down before the storm, and it would’ve been five or six hours to put everything back in order if I’d done it alone.

The one silver lining? We stopped at the Pineapple Hotel afterward for dinner. It was steak night—300 grams of rump for 20 bucks. Plus a $10 pint of Green Beacon.