Fires, Flooding, Pandemic

FIRES

The end of 2019 saw us being evacuated from our house because of the bushfires.

We'd been dealing with heavy smoke in the mountains since the fires started back in October. The fires were big and there was a lot of them.

We hadn't had much rain here in the last few years. Not enough to call it significant anyway.

It's 4 days before Christmas. We got home from golf and started plugging the down gutters and filling them with water while hosing everything down.

We've been under severe water restrictions for months because of the drought, but we were allowed to use our hose to protect our property from the fires.

We started hosing everything down when we turned around and saw a massive smoke cloud. The next thing we knew, we had 5 fire trucks on our tiny little street.

We were told if we were going to leave, to leave now.

We had a plan for my FIL. He's on oxygen 24 hours a day, so the best place for him was hospital. We got him packed up and in the car, packed the cats up into a carrier and tossed our bags in the boot. We had all of the most important things packed and in the car (insurance papers, passports, birth certificates, mum's ashes, etc).

We took dad to the hospital, I got him checked in while Laurance sat in the car. We took the cats and went down to the club until we could figure out where we were going to go. We had 2 cats and hadn't really made a plan for ourselves. We were more worried about getting dad to safety.

I got a message from a friend of ours, Kerrie, who has a duplex. She invited us to take the 1 bedroom unit and use it for as long as we needed to. We took her up on it. We got there, got the cats settled and we were finally able to breathe a little. We were all safe.

We went back to the house every day to hose it down again and grab a couple more things. We decided that if the house burnt down, it was ok. The house is insured and as long as we're all safe, that's all that mattered.

The fire got to within 150 meters of our house.

We got the all clear to go home Christmas Eve. We were still on alert that there was a possibility we may need to evacuate again so we kept our bags packed and by the front door.

FLOODING

We've gone from severe drought and the country being on fire to torrential rains and flooding.

We saw a months worth of rain fall in an hour and a years worth of rain fall in a day. It was absolutely insane. We went from one extreme to another.

The great thing about the rain was that it put out completely every single bush fire we had here. It's also meant that our dams are at capacity or near capacity so some of our water restrictions have been lifted.

Between the fires and floods, golf has been a bit sparse. We still got out for a hit every chance we got, but they were for the most part hot and smoke filled or ankle deep in water and mud type of rounds.

PANDEMIC

Now we get to the pandemic. Good ole CoronaVirus or Covid-19.

It's sent people into complete panic and caused some serious shit for brains. People started hoarding toilet paper.

For months now, we have struggled to find many of the following things:

Toilet Paper

Paper Towel

Facial Tissues

Rice

Pasta

Flour

Hand soap (liquid and bars)

Hand Sanitiser

And now there's limits on almost everything you can buy from bread and milk to canned goods and frozen veggies.

We've been placed into lockdown. That means we can only leave the house for essential things like going to work if you can't work from home, grocery shopping, caring for an elderly family member, a doctors appointment, exercise and even a root with your partner.

The pandemic saw our course shut down for a couple of weeks. Golf wasn't considered exercise.

Social distancing has become the new norm.

Our golf course was reopened, but with strict rules. 2 people per tee time, 1 person per cart, mark your own card, play your game, no shaking hands, flags stay in, no rakes in bunkers, drop your card off and leave.

Police are stopping people like crazy up here and fining them for non-essential travel. We're not leaving the house unless we have to.

Laurance's hours have been cut because of the pandemic so he's down to working 2 days a week.

We go out to do the grocery shopping and to play golf. Other than that, we're at home.

This pandemic is giving us a chance to do a lot of things we've talked about doing in and around the house. We're slowly flipping the boards on the deck. We've started our winter vegetables in the greenhouse. We're sorting through things in the cupboards and getting rid of a lot of stuff. Maybe we'll even get the floors redone and the house painted too.

Stay safe everyone.

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