I hope your Christmas was a hell of a lot better than mine.
I spent all Christmas Eve helping my mother clean the entire house and cook. We have this traditional dinner where the entire family comes over and we eat ood, sing carols and go to midnight mass. yada yada yada.
Everyone was coming over at 7, and we managed to get everything finished at 5:30, so we were ready.
There were these thick clouds heading our way, and we could see a storm starting. Now, normally, storms kind of sweep past our place. We have lightning, we have thunder and a little bit too much rain, but that's pretty much it. We get a front-row seat to see the storms.
Not this one.
We were on the balcony, watching it get closer. Lightning was everywhere, and the thunder was grumbling. It was pretty cool. My dad got his camera and took some photos, and video-taped some of it. He's crazy like that. I still believed it was fly by.
All of a sudden, this wall of water threw itself at us, splashing the entire front of the house, because we were standing in the doorway. We jumped back, closed the doors, and held onto them...I thought they were going to blow over.
We had to yell at each other to be heard. Rain was pounding on us from every angle. It was the only sound we could actually hear. We couldn't see past the windows, it was just huge splatterings of water.
My grandmother was watching out of the back, when she suddenly called out that one of the tress had landed in the pool. Now it was getting serious.
The power went out just before the huge gush of water. There was nothing but the hammering noise of water for about 10 minutes, and the winds as it aided the water into our house.
That's right. Into the house. All the windows and doors were closed. But there was such a huge amount of water that it flooded the windows and poured into my brother's and grandparent's rooms, into the computer room and into the living room. Luckily, my room is on the other side of the house.
When it quietened down a little, we went to the back to check out what had happened. My dad came rushign in to tell us a tree had fallen.
It just missed the house. Just. It's this huge 15-metre gum tree, near the house, with two think trunks. One of them snapped like a match and smashed through the pool fence, some palm trees and the pool net, landing in the pool. The talle trunk hit the edge o the roo, smashing some tiles before landing on top of the other trunk.
On the other side of the pool, another extremely tall gum lost all of it's branches. Most of them fell into the pool, splintering into smaller pieces and falling on top of the spa, the sauna, the fence and hanging in the branches of lower trees.
My tomatoes were squashed. But the strawberries survived.
ANother tree, with two trunks, lost both of them. They're both leaning in the same direction, hanging onto the back ence and leaning into our neighbour's yard.
A tree at the front fell, blocking the driveway and the gate.
Another tree lost some huge branches, with one of them falling onto the roof, but causing no damage.
The Christmas lights? They're still hanging on.
WHen it cleared up, about half an hour later, we walked out. The entire street was just....wow. Trees and branches everywhere.
Everyone showed up half an hour later. We were still in raggedy clothes, tryign to get rid of the mini-flood in the house.
We ate Christmas dinner in the dark.......we didn't get any pwoer until 2pm the following day! We were the last place to get power. Emergency crews drove around for 20 hours, cutting branches and trees off powerlines, tryign to determine the problem. SUpposedly, some transormer thignys blew up.
Our street and the next one were the hardest hit in the entire city. We bore the brunt of it....lucky us. It's never been like that before. it was like a mini-cyclone!
On the enxt street, there's a huge park. All the trees were up-rooted, lying next to their original resting places.
And ever since, every night, there are more storms. And a lot mroe rain. dammit....why won't it go?
In other news.....only 4 more days until I leave. Yay!
Angel.
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