Welcome to 2009 to all my fellow Aussies and then in hours' time to my overseas friends! I wish everyone a happy healthy year ahead and let us hope for world peace.
7am and our son from Sydney has already rung us. Of course he is up early - he has two bright eyed excited little ones who were keen to see what Santa brought!
A few people who look at my blog have asked to see our house so here it is! It is not by any means like the average Australian home these days as it is almost 70 years old but we have had quite a few renovations done to make it way more pleasant to live in.
This is what you see from the front of our house! We have 2000 hectares which is all dry like this right now. It will probably stay dry now until the storms which we hope will start early in October - unusual but we might get earlier ones hopefully.
I just wanted to show everyone what a lovely surprise came delivered to me last weekend! This arrangement is the most beautiful that I have had in my life. Grant and Kellie gave it to me for housesitting for them and also for Mother's Day!!
The cellophane all came off just for the photo but is all put back on and taped up as we just have so much dust here right now - it is so bone dry! I said that I would have to tuck it away in a cupboard maybe for my retirement home where there may be no dust as I want to treasure it forever but it is now in our lounge and looking lovely.
Thank you Grant and Kell!!!! Very thoughtful when you both had other worries.
The first photo is an arial view of my daughter and son in law's property. 95% of their land was under water but the level had dropped when the photo was taken. The dark patches were all covered with water when it was at its peak. Their house is the white dot at the very top. The other buildings are their sheds. They have been isolated for over a week now and have a two year old and an eight month old. Think they were starting to run out of a few essentials.
These next photos were taken by my son or daughter in law who live on the south side of Emerald. Wouldn't it be dreadful for the people who are having this house built. Grant is a builder and knows just what the damage to the houses will be from sitting in water for so long. There was a photo on the news of a house outside Emerald with just the roof visible. Hundreds of homes will have water through them.
This is the main access bridge into Emerald and the main part of the town is totally isolated. Many people have been evacuated from their houses. School was due to start next week but now not until a week later to give people time to clean up etc. once the water goes down.
And this is where the Emerald water came from - the Fairbairn Dam which flowed over the spillway for the first time in 17 years. It got to a height of 4.5 metres over the dam wall so you can imagine the massive volume of water going downstream to Emerald. The water takes about six hours to get from the dam wall to Emerald.
This card was made for an online friend in the Netherlands and uses the Cuttlebug embossing folder, some stamps from Stampin' Up! and the row of flowers are from Papertrey.
Oh hard it was to try to get a half decent photo of these two together! These are my daughter's two little boys - eighteen months between them and they will be such good mates when they are older [we hope LOL].