Stormy Weather

We have had a spate of bad weather topped by the worst storm in 10 years. This monster had gale force winds, heavy rain, and cold temperatures for THREE days. I used to hate writers who wrote in caps but having lived through the storm, nothing else conveys the immensity of it. The above picture is of the solid metal bench that the wind blew over.

First of all you have to remember that we live on a farm. Our toilets flush, our water runs, and the stock are watered by a pump – an electric pump. Guess what happens when you don’t have electricity for 3 days. Yup, you use buckets of rain water to flush the toilets. That gets old real fast.

Without electricity you can’t cook. You can’t heat the house. My heat pump is useless. The big house’s wood burning fireplace has an electronic something or other so we couldn’t use that. The hen hearted of us – the kids, Yael, and I – beat feet back to the apartment in Auckland which did have power.

Dan, the intrepid one, stayed behind. But after 3 days of having been told by the power company that:

The power would be back on within 2 hours 

The power would be back on within 4 hours

The power was on (it wasn’t! Did they think we wouldn’t have noticed?)

Dan decided to take matters into his own hands. He went driving the back roads of Warkworth until he found a crew working on the lines and convinced one of the men to stop by our pole at the end of his shift. Turns out that all the rest of our area had had power the entire 3 days.  All we needed was for this true gentleman to flick a switch and we had power.

With all that going on, I had not been keeping eyes on the sheep. The result was that when we moved them to a new paddock, I noticed that some of the Suffolk were bulking up. Now I can’t swear they are pregnant but they certainly look it. Do you agree? Perhaps we’ll have a bumper crop of lamb chops after all.