Articles in “Random Photographs”

It’s not, I imagine, good Internet etiquette to disappear from your blog just after posting photographs of rising floodwaters. But shortly after posting the last photographs, we lost power (at noon on Wednesday), and we’ve only just had it restored. This suburb was hit, and hit hard. We were lucky and sustained no property damage, but we did take the police’s advice and evacuate on Wednesday night.

The reason we evacuated was that this was the view from our bedroom window:

All Wednesday, we watched the floodwaters rise up the street towards the house. By afternoon, with the flood expected to peak at 5.5 metres at 4 am, we knew we couldn’t stand it any longer. 5.5 metres would put the floodwater inside the lower storey of our house, maybe right up to the floorboards of the top storey, and we didn’t want to make this more difficult for everyone by trying to leave in the wee small hours. So we grabbed the emergency bag we’d packed that morning and fled to friends on a higher hill.

We came back on Thursday to find the waters, peaking nearly a metre lower than anticipated, had stopped on our boundary line.

This is a street of hills and valleys, like so many Brisbane streets. All the hills stayed dry, and all the valleys flooded. We’re perched on the side of the smallest hill on the street, and that freak of geography was enough to keep us dry, for which we’ll always be grateful.

So I have no photographs of the flood’s peak, but I imagine many of you have had your fill of flood photographs in the five days we’ve been without power. I’m posting these photographs anyway, because this is my street and my suburb: all these photographs were taken within two streets of my home and now, five days later, it’s almost impossible to believe what they looked like then.

The last one is the view from my back verandah, over the neighbour’s roof.

This morning, we moseyed up to the Blue Mountains and, after lunch, over to Govett’s Leap, from which you can obtain a spectacular view down to the Bridal Falls.

Normally.

There might have been a bit too much fog on the mountains today for a really good view.

My thoughtful parents have painted the hearthstone in the spare-room fireplace white, to stop witches coming down the chimney:

Now, that’s what I call thoroughgoing hospitality.

With further assistance from my lovely assistant, Nicholas:

With some help from captioner-extraordinaire, Nicholas:

Hipstamatic has brought out a new pack—lens, film, and camera cover—called the Dali Museum GoodPak. Apparently, the film creates an expansive, painterly border (like Dali’s art, without boundaries).

And the lens? Well, the lens just does whatever it likes, really:

I may never look at my feet in the same light again.

While the brilliant Heather was carving pumpkins, the equally brilliant Michelle (also of the live-blogging peanut gallery) was making witch-finger biscuits (which—hee!—I warn you are not for the faint hearted):

The biscuits themselves are shortbread, or something very like it, which makes them just about my favourite type of biscuit in the world.

But delicious shortbread or not, I definitely had to close my eyes before biting off the bit with the fingernail on it.

Last night was our Hallowe’en Party—well, actually a combination Hallowe’en, Oktoberfest, up-coming anniversary, and friend’s birthday party, which really just meant quite a lot of alcohol with a fringe of cake.

But since it was Hallowe’en adjacent, the brilliant Heather (well known on the blog as one of the live-blogging peanut gallery) carved us some pumpkins:

Now the scary jack o’lantern is brilliant. Nothing like triangle eyes here:

But this was most definitely the pièce de résistance:

Eric Northman pumpkin. Isn’t he marvellous? All night, people were saying, “That pumpkin’s a bit sexy. How can a pumpkin be sexy?”