Man, Queensland's copping it. Cyclone Yasi -- that is the biggest murtherin' storm I've ever seen on Australian radar. Category five, headed for Innisfail. (Guess we're going to be paying a fortune for bananas again.)
Silliness aside... I'm nervous. My Dad lives up on the Atherton tablelands along with my stepmum. They reckon it'll still be Category Two when it blows through their place.
Dad's no fool. He's got the place taped up and battened down, and Rose has already trundled off to her sister's brick and concrete place. But a storm this size... fuck. And then there are my Cairns-based friends.
I'm kinda chewing my nails here. I went through a few cyclones as a kid. They were a bit scary during the blowy part, but afterwards the rain and flooding were pretty much just an irritation, for a kid. Power outages, roads cut - yeah, we'd eat tinned food for a few days, read by candlelight, take cold showers.
But nothing I went through was bigger than Category 3. And this thing... it's a friggin' monster.
Take care, those of you in that part of the world. Look after each other.
Meanwhile, down here in Tas it's Natalie's birthday.... yay!
There's the Mau-mau applying rainbow sprinkles to the epic two-story chocolate cake I baked. The Mau-mau is of the opinion that there's nothing which cannot be improved with a liberal spray of rainbow sprinkles.
That's the cake-beast from above. Two layers of rich chocolate cake with a layer of home-made raspberry/lemon jam between, and vanilla-cream icing. The writing on top is... kind of messy. I admit this. It isn't easy to write in pink vanilla-cream icing using an empty syringe as your piping bag, you see.I wouldn't have it any other way, though. There's something about using an empty syringe to decorate a doctor's birthday cake which is just... proper.
She got two Wii games, a couple of books, a couple more books -- and flogging great 1.5 terabyte external backup drive, plus a promise from yours truly that I will back up her damned computer every week or two.
I mean - she did finally get rid of Vista, after all. It's the least I can do.
