Another eventful lockdown day (or maybe little things now seem adventurous, as a contract to the sameness of most of our usual days). We had a massive wind storm - some rain, but mainly strong, damaging winds, and the power went out. We manage with power outages on a semi-regular basis, but this was just as it was getting dark, most of our phones had little charge which is unusual for us, my car wasn't here so we couldn't use my 2nd battery to charge up things we needed, we'd been just about to cook dinner, I tried to look up the website to see how extensive the outage was but none of our devices would load the site, and it just felt unusually difficult to manage. One positive though is that the water tanks are full after all the rain we've had so we still had water gravity feeding through the taps and we'd be able to flush the toilet. We got camping lights out of the trailer (which was tricky in itself because it was wet and windy while I was rummaging around trying to find them) and our camping stove - a friend had given us one that they'd got 2nd hand, to replace our old stove that was dying, and I hadn't tried it out yet. I couldn't find a hose with it so we disconnected the hose from our old stove and used it, but when we turned the new one on there was gas leaking. It seemed to be missing an O-ring and we tried to replace it with some we had here but they weren't the right size. We thought about going down to Coles to get a new O-ring, then realised it might be easier just to buy dinner, then realised that there was also no power in Healesville. Tony, Liam and Caitlin went for a drive to find food and had to go a bit further than expected - I was a little worried as they didn't get home until after 8, but they found food and got there and back with no trouble. While they were gone the power came back on, I was so grateful for all that that allowed us to do. I was even more grateful when I discovered that Healesville was still out an hour later, and Lilydale still had no power a couple of hours later than that. Very unusual that Tarrawarra gets power back before other places, we're normally last on the list. There were trees down all over the place, and the Black Spur was closed due to trees and a car trapped where the person needed to be rescued by air ambulance - we saw and heard the helicopter go over each way. It reminded me that the little inconveniences we'd had over the past couple of days really weren't that big a deal.
Prior to the storm the day had been fairly quiet, and fun. I pottered around in the morning, the girls watched SIMS videos and The Saddle Club on YouTube, I ordered some things we needed from Office Works, Caitlin and I researched the easiest place to buy cheap yarn so she can keep making her little creatures, Amelie and I did some number puzzles, I had a Zoom appointment with my counsellor, I reset Amelie's Animal Crossing New Leaf game so that she could start from the beginning (she'd bought a pre-owned copy so the save file had someone else's data in it), Caitlin decorated her cupboard with stickers, Liam played Getting Over It, I talked to a friend a couple of times. Caitlin and I went for a walk in the late afternoon - it was already pretty windy and the clouds were very black to the south. We'd had sunshine throughout the day but it was looking more and more ominous as we walked, it was pretty spectacular. We checked out the creek, it's running much lower again now, and walked along the front of the property where we noticed the fields of the Abbey are still covered in water, so we went across the road to get a closer look. It looked pretty cool. At that point, there were dark clouds everywhere and it was starting to rain, but Mt Dandenong was bathed in golden sunlight - that looked even more cool!
Numbers are staying in the low to mid 100s, deaths are continuing to happen every day, although some days now they are in single digits.
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