Right-o who pissed off Mother Nature?

Every now and then, just when we think we have it made and are actually pretty tough, good ole' Mother Nature comes along....quietly...up behind us...tip-toeing aaaaaallllll the way....and she carries a big spade....
And so we stand there looking at our buildings and our bea-uti-ful roads and our petro-chemical haze and we pat each other on the back and cackle and generally agree that yep, we've come a long way and yep, we're doing alright and yep, no worries.

And then WHACK!! A spade to the funny bone. WHACK!! Another as we stumble to the ground. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!..........WHACK!.......WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Then she leaves us, battered and bruised on the ground wondering what in the hell just happened, clutching our bleeding shins and apologising profusely. As she wanders away she knows she'll be back soon enough, you'll see her next week sometime down at the Warehouse looking for a bigger spade...maybe a shovel...

This happened yesterday.

In fact it started the day before with a couple of rollicking earthquakes within an hour or two of each other. They registered 5-6 on the Japanese scale and "BIG" on the Berin scale. No damage but some swinging lights and funny sounds coming from the house, or more specifically, its foundations. Still, we slept soundly and that was that.

The walk to work yesterday was normal enough, it started spitting as I arrived and continued to do so throughout the morning. There was another earthquake and everyone got back to work. Then, just about lunchtime, someone decided to go a trampling on Mother Natures vegetable patch...and that got her mad... It was typhoon time.

Crrrrriiiiikey it blew. Shortly after she put the Wind-o-Meter to 11 I was looking out of the 7th floor of the Town Hall here and saw two transformers explode in big, red, sparky explosions. I braced my shins for the spade strike. Across the road from work 7 out of 10 cars had their rear windows implode, the power cut off, people were evacuated from the windward side of the building because windows from the 2nd to the 7th floor were shattering, trees were uprooted, rooftiles flew off houses by the roof load, an oyster bed structure from the harbour broke free and drifted up the inlet beside work, destroying a barge which had about 60 44-gallon drum sized polystyrene floats, these then either choked the inlet or became airborne, flying across the intersection near the harbour and making desperate bids for freedom (this morning there were 12 corralled in an area about 500 meters from the water). And still it ratcheted itself up. the international definition of a typhoon is winds at 30 meters/second, the peak yesterday was 60.1 meters/second. Thats TWICE THE TYPHOON FOR THE SAME LOW LOW PRICE. Do the maths. Mathletes. Powerlines fell down, signs flew off shops, the traffic lights were out, stop signs and the like were torn off or just plain fell over, a boat broke free in the inlet and wandered around, luckily there were a whole bunch of polystyrene floats scattered around or it could have done itself some real damage on the concrete walls.

Nic hunkered down at home taking a blankie and some pillows into the bathroom where there are the least windows, and had herself a nap. Good on her I say. It blew and it blew and it blew and it blew and then at about 4-ish we all sort of looked at each other and realised that it was quiet. At about 4:30 I was looking out the window (again) and saw about 300 seagulls launch themselves from their hiding place and swoop off, that was pretty cool.

Man. Windy. We had no power until about 10:30 last night so we drank Chilean red and played crib by candlelight. Thank you Mother Nature, 'twas a lovely evening. I hope you fellas are all tops.

Special thanks to Arch for his grand posts from the depths of South East Asia, keep it up sunshine. To Kate for her photos recently of her and Andrew cavorting in front of huge cutout slices of the dictionary defined "Scotland" and thanks to Mike for updating his site. I still haven't looked at it as we don't have the internet at home yet and I like my job too much to access your filth from work.

Right. Tata. Good.