Rain drops keep falling on my head... Or not.

OK, so the rain I asked for has come, accompanied by some awesome lightning and massive winds.

I have a love/hate relationship with lightning. While I still enjoy watching it (from a safe distance), I have had a few too many close calls while wild camping in the Swiss Alps to really enjoy being out in it. For example, being at 3000m and 3 hours hike away from camp watching the lightning strike in the valley below me. Or lying awake in the dark for hours, having been woken up by the ground shaking due to the strikes, too scared to death to even turn the torch on in case it attracts the storms attention. So thats why I'm hiding inside.

Anyway, it got me thinking about rainfall in general and Australia being the desert continent that it is...

Perth is suffering pretty badly at the moment. The total rainfall since my birthday back in November is, wait for it, 0.2mm, on the 7th February. Seriously. I can't even see that small. There has been the odd shower in and around Perth, and I assume that this is one of them that happened to pass over the recording station.

The population of Perth is increasing massively and rapidly. We're at 1.65 million up from 1.34 million in 2001. 300,000 extra people in less than a decade. Thats 3 times the number of people who live in the town I come from at home arriving in quick succession. And I'm one of them.

And we're putting a massive strain on the resources.

The water corperation want us to save 6 buckets of water a day. I try to. Really I do, but having been brought up with generally more water than we can deal with (all though I do remember one summer with standpipes and trucked in bottled water for school) you tend not to think about it. Though I have started trying to shorten my showers and turn the water off when I shave my legs. I can do it out bush, when we only have 700 litres to last 6 of us a week. But its never enough to actually get clean, especially from the state we're usually in. Its more psychological clean in that case!

And our lawn sprinklers never seem to come on either, so we're saving water there! Though we don't have much of a lawn left...

What really annoys me is when the council owned areas are wasting huge amounts of water, sprinkling the roads and paths. And all over the cyclists in the case of Perth foreshore. At least 2 days a week there is a bottle neck near the Causeway, as people on bikes and foot and going both directions weave around the puddles and the jets of water. But we're the ones who have to save our 6 buckets?!

People laughed at the idea of a canal from the Kimberly, but seriously, if O'Connor could build the pipeline from Perth to Kalgoorlie over 100 years ago, surely we can do better. After all, its down hill from up there :)

Oh, and while we have the tropical thunderstorms, Al is fell running in the snow.

Read about it here