SOMEWHAT SOGGY

It's yet another cold morning, but after what seemed like a month 
of constant rain it's finally predicted to warm up and dry off from 
now on. It's been the wettest October on record for the state of 
Victoria overall, and the gravel roads sure show it. My regular 
route to town has become ridiculously pot-holed for the few Kms 
before reaching the tarmac, but the alternative route is even 
worse, with water still running down it last week, through a deep 
channel where it's washed right through all the layers of gravel. I 
looked up the actual total for October at the nearest weather 
station and it's 139.6mm, which is actually a lot less than other 
parts of the state, though still well above the 57.0mm average 
since the station was built in 2000. Then again I don't really 
trust it because some readings have been pretty dodgy in the past 
and it says there was no rain yesterday, which was clearly wrong 
(or I guess maybe extremely localised, but there are too many of 
those cases).

Luckily I'm on a hill so unlike many other areas of the state where 
towns have been going underwater, I've had no real problem with 
flooding. There was water running down the road (which is about a
hundred meters away from my house) like a river a couple of weeks 
ago though.

I never did mention that the op-shop in town finally opened again 
in a new location, since their old building burnt down last year. 
Annoyingly they're now closing an hour earlier which makes it hard 
for me to catch them, but I did manage to grab a good selection of 
DVDs including a set of Louis Theroux documentaries that I'm 
currently watching through in alternation with that excellent 1980s 
'Hands' series about Irish crafts (the YouTube playlist that I 
linked to before turns out to be much better quality than wherever 
I downloaded the first few episodes). Anyway, I went back a little 
while ago and it turns out now they've been flooded (poor drainage, 
I suspect), so they're shut again. Fire, water... if next the place 
is destroyed by a mini tornado then it's clear that the gods just 
don't want an op-shop in that town!

Ironically all this water means that I can't really visit many more 
dams, because the ones that are left are all down 2WD-dry-weather 
gravel roads which are likely to be in a terrible state at this 
point. I will try to get to the cluster around the Grampians 
sometime soon though. I did go to see the West Barwon Reservoir 
spilling a few weeks ago, which actually turned out to look much 
less dramatic than the spillway at the Bostock reservoir, even 
though the latter is'nt nearly as steep.

Well it's 9AM, so I'd better stop babbling and get to work.

 - The Free Thinker