Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

A domestic disaster

Quite a bit of rain fell during the past 24 hours. There was a deluge here yesterday afternoon which temporarily flooded our front driveway. Apparently too, a small tornado ripped through the suburb of Rolystone on the edge of the Darling Escarpment. It's about a 30 minute drive from our house. Since our own tornado experience a few years ago there's a jittery feeling every time similar conditions manifest anywhere else.

Early this morning I got the jitters again when I was awakened by a series of lightning flashes without any thunder. They weren't full size lightning bolts as such, more like a weak indistinct flash from a camera, but they were definitely a natural phenomena. Heavy rain arrived shortly afterwards, but thankfully no tornado.

There was a small domestic disaster here just before tea time last night. We planned to have home made meat pies so that my wife and two youngest children could get away early to a Scouting event. We'd cooked the mince and everything was almost ready. Unbeknown to us, our son decided to intervene; instead of following instructions and getting his Scout stuff ready for departure.

An almighty crash came from the kitchen. He'd decided to get the Sunbeam pie making machine down from its storage shelf and accidentally dropped it.

I loved that pie maker. It was the best electrical kitchen gadget I'd ever bought. I even wrote about how wonderful it was on Fremantlebiz - 4 June 2007. We'd taken great care of it over the past year so that it didn't have a scratch on its non-stick surfaces.

My son was still looking down in disbelief at it when I got to the kitchen. He blurted out, "It wasn't my fault." I looked around for the mystery culprit and pretty quickly concluded his alibi was pretty weak. He was guilty. Alas for the pie machine, it was totally cactus. They're not designed to be dropped on the floor by butter fingered Bart Simpson-like teenagers.

Fortunately we were able to initiate a plan B. Our trusty old analogue jaffle iron was retrieved from under the sink. It's what we used for decades before Sunbeam invented their wonderful gadget.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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