Jobee's Journal

E is presenting a project on a Famous Australian on Thursday. We decided she could use the Governor General as her Famous Australian. It makes it easier for all of us being someone she has met. And the fact that she thinks Ms Bryce is wonderful helps (she still calls her the nice lady who asked about my dress) E is supposed to dress up & act like the person she has researched. The dress up bit is easy - she has already requested make up. She's been practising reading out her powerpoint - after each slide we have to 'make it big' so she can present it! I finished off the scrapbook pages I had done about the visit so she can display them on the day. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .

It's hard not to write about flooding at the minute. The water dropped quite a bit today - enough that they opened the road past the Lagoon Bridge & Bohena Creek was opened again. Yes - probably means nothing to anyone who doesn't know the area, but it means there is a way in & out!! Not that we are rushing to do either (we don't have a 4WD & would prefer not to have to put our cars through water). There is another flood peak coming tomorrow morning. Hopefully it will drop as quickly as it did today. The bigger news for today was that E got an award at school. Presentation night was going to be on Tuesday night. Over half of the school can't get into town, so decisions had to quickly be made about what to do. As a part of the presentation night is each class doing a dance it was a difficult decision to make. In the end they decided to postpone the dance part of the evening & go ahead with the awards. E was home sick today & we don't find out who...

What is it about extreme weather events that makes you have to look at what's going on almost compulsively!! The internet is great for being able to see where storms & rain are coming from. Which is what I'm doing now as a severe thunderstorm warning has just been issued. Coonamble has had 93mm of rain in a very short period of time. While we might not get that much (Walgett got 2mm & Coonabaraban 31mm), watching the green on the radar is almost compulsory.  And then there's the river levels during a flood. We watch them come up & down on the BOM websites for each gauge along the river. It's certainly alot better to get that info than it used to be when we relied on word of mouth. As for the misinformation in the media about the flooding here - this morning one of the papers said that Pilliga was isolated -- much to the kids disappointment the school bus ran so it wasn't isolated. And I've just found out the following -- A friend has just said sh...

The river has peaked, it hasn't rained again so it's all calm again for the minute! We just went for a drive & while the water is way higher than it was yesterday at a similar time, it is also starting to drop. There are still 2 roads open (one to 4WD only). but by tomorrow it should drop quite a bit.  Rail Bridge on the road out to Burren Junction - this is after you go across the bridge.  Lagoon Bridge Other side of the Lagoon Bridge - this is where the water cuts off the road in that direction - once you get past this water the road is clear (well some of the floodways might have some water in them, but you can get to Narrabri). Vera's Leap (been closed for about a week) Mum took these photos during the day today. Her camera is way better than mine! A fact that became glaringly obvious when I looked at her photos & mine in the same folder on the computer. I've got a few more to upload but I'll leave them until tomorrow. We are still w...

We live on a flood plain. It is a known fact that it floods here. That's why they built a levee bank around the town in the 1970's. Before that when it flooded everyone just lifted their furniture, parked their cars out of town, lived in the water & dealt with the clean up as the water receded. I've been here 16 years & have lost count of the number of floods there have been in that time. There was a drought when I first came. The most memorable year for floods was 1998. That's when it flooded on & off for quite a few months. The river would come up, we'd be isolated for a week then it'd rain again just in time for the roads to open. It went on for months. So now we're back into the cycle of weather that means floods. Lots of rain last week, so a flood was inevitable. The height was dependant on the amount of rain around here + the amount of water coming down the river from upstream. There are 4 main roads in & out of our town. The main...