PAD - January 18 - Hot

A hot pink gerbera from a flower arrangement that Phan and Elizabeth bought for my Mum's birthday last week... Taken in the morning at around 7am and it was already getting hot here in Brissie... it got to 35 degrees today (the hottest day in Brisbane in 12 months!) and was incredibly humid! We spent half the day at Elizabeth's friend Veronica's house and they don't have aircon, so we really felt the heat today! However, the girls did get to splash around in the pool. They had a ball... and it was the first time I had ever let Elizabeth go in the water by herself... I'm normally always in the water with her, but with Catherine, I couldn't go in, so Catherine and I sat on the edge of the pool dangling our feet in the water. We were close enough so that if anything had happened, I could have quickly put Catherine down and jumped in the pool to help the girls... but they were fine They are both reasonably sensible and both have a lot of water confidence, so it was just lovely to see how much they've grown up as they swam around together and talked and played together in the water... And it was refreshing for us to just sit by the pool and dangle our feet in the water.

The extreme humidity of the day had me guessing there would be a thunderstorm tonight and I wasn't wrong... the BOM issued a severe thunderstorm warning at 3pm saying a really bad storm was passing over Ipswich, Logan and Brisbane and it was going to pass directly over our suburb in the north... I got quite worried and battened down the hatches and kept an eye on everything and it got very dark and windy and pelted down with rain for a short while, but then passed over without too much incidence. I think we were quite lucky, 'cos I was reading the QLD Police FB page and it appeared that it hit really hard in other parts within our suburb as other houses were without power, trees had fallen on powerlines and there was general chaos in our area. We still had power and everything was still ok, so we definitely escaped the worst of it. The weather forecasters say this Brisbane wet storm season which La Nina has brought will last about another 8 weeks (which is roughly the start of autumn)... Honestly, I can't wait for this summer to be over... I'm regularly checking the BOM and every storm has me worried now!!!