You won’t see me for dust

I love that saying “he’s going on like he just won Lotto”.

Another weather first for most of us last week – raining mud. Like everyone else, we had a load of washing on the line which would have had a better chance of being clean if I’d chucked it in the chook pen. I was actually driving when the dust storm and ‘rain’ hit, and whilst it seems ungrateful to being negative about it, we ended up with a whole lot of the dust and dirt from the roof being washed into the tank (no time to do the pipe flush, should have been on top of that, grrrr). Many of you would have been stuck at your desk in an office last Thursday, only to come out at quitting time to find your car completely covered in reddish-brown goop. What an event.

The happiest people in our region? Surely the owners of the car wash places! Whilst it’s not really cricket to laugh at others misfortune, I’m betting they were behaving like they’d won lotto on Thursday night, knowing that every single car in across the Central West needed a wash, and that level 5 water restrictions mean there’s only one place to do it. I went for a reccie mission on Friday, just to see how far the queue stretched … it was longer than the line outside the ladies bathroom at Day On The Green! Suffice to say I drove on past, with just the shape of the Play School Arched Window on my windscreen punching a hole in the canopy of dirt covering my car.

… and now it’s rained. Not sure how you fared on Saturday arvo as you listened to the Triple J Hottest 100, but out our way we had 2 solid inches. Yep, 52 amazing millimetres. It was so loud we had to turn up the stereo to allow Ocean Alley and Denzel Curry to compete with the noise on the roof. We were going on like we’d won lotto. It came in two separate dumpings, almost exactly an inch each time. It took me until the second dumping to remember to reverse the cars out of the garage to wash off all the dirt!  Sorry Mr Car Wash man. Nice clean water and lots of it, into the tanks for us. Whilst it’s still looking in pretty poor shape, the damn level rose to something that’s now at ‘acceptable’. I’m hoping that the trees around our place that have shed a lot of leaves to go into survival mode let out a collective sigh of relief as they took a bucketing. A quick check of the Air Quality Index for our region showed a lovely green ‘good’ level of 19. Waking up on Sunday morning to see a tinge of green across what used to be the lawn added to our lotto-like sentiments. I noticed a few centres further west received some rain, but nowhere near what we got. Not enough for them to behave like they’d won lotto, but I’m sure any farmers or firefighters who had some rain at their place just went outside and stood in it. We won’t forget that the pain isn’t over, of forget your efforts, but we hope the journey to recovery may be starting.

If I ever did actually win the lotto? You certainly wouldn’t hear me saying in my interview “Oh, yeah, I’ll keep working for a while, I be too bored if I quit work”. Yeah, right. Just like last Thursday, you wouldn’t be seeing me for the dust.