Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Raining and Pouring

We live on the river, lucky our house is way up high!  Cause when we get lots of rain, up comes the river.  These pics are taken from our verandah and normally you can't see the river flowing under the trees.  The shed/aviary things to the right of the photo are our neighbours chook houses and also please note the myriad of young trees happening to the right of the photo planted throughout the grass.  These have doubled in size, I put them in when we first moved here 2 years ago, they will be awesome one day.
Here is a zoomed in view of the kids and Stevo watching the water flow.  Where they are standing is normally well clear of the river and the kids can play under the big trees.
This is nearby to where they were standing in the above picture and you can see a fence post sticking up in the water, this is our back fence between our yard and the river! 
This is probably the 3rd time the river has come up this high since we have been here and the fence cops it each time!  This is after 3 inches of rain then another fast 5 to 6 inches the next day!
So what do you do on a Sunday afternoon when it pouring and the river is coming up and you know the causeway 100metres down the road will be under...you go check it out and watch for anyone that may attempt to cross it!  In the background you can see Granma and Grandad who were coming over for a visit and instead waved to us from across the causeway!  At this point it was at 1m, which is probably the highest we've seen it, I can drive through here at 0.6m if its not running fast, no one attempted this level of water so there was no excitement.  Lucky the water goes down really quickly here, only a couple of hours and its gone if the rain stops, plus we can get out the other direction.
On the way back up the road we stopped at our neighbours and this is their backyard, well a bit of it anyway.  They back on to our river also but their place is flatter ground the river seems swell wider here.  The line of trees in the middle of the photo through the swollen river is backing on to the horse track, to the right of these trees - the big trees is the actual normal river and there is a bridge in there we cross to continue on the horse track which takes you into town.
Our neighbours have the most unreal frog pond in an old tank, it is full of frogs in all stages from tadpoles to this size and bigger.  We got inspired to make our own frog pond, so we are recycling our old bath tub into a frog pond, stay tuned.
And lastly, the cooking I did for the next few weeks on this rainy afternoon.  Passionfruit Gems (a new favourite), Cornflake Cookies and Chocolate Chunk Cookies- all safely frozen in the freezer out of harms way and ready for lunchboxes!