Samantha turns 5

“Your children grow up so quickly”. Our little princess turned 5 on Friday with all the fan fair that makes her such a little character. On her actual birthday we did the usual family thing together. She was so excited with all her presents, which of course had a ‘Dora’ theme. We then had a little party dinner.

However the real fun came for her when she had a ‘Dora’ birthday party with 14 of her close friends on the Saturday afternoon. While the weather was cold and windy that didn’t seem to bother the kids who all had a great time playing numerous games and eating lots of party food. Samantha had a beautiful butterfly cake and also received some great presents from her friends.

Windstorm 1st Aug 08

I'd just settled into my usual Friday night activity of watching the footy on Tv with a bourbon in hand when the wind started. It'd been predicted all day but typical of the bureau their timing was way off. Well, it blew and blew and eventually the pager started going off with peoples 'request for assistance'. The wind was gusting so bad that at times you could feel the whole house shudder.

We later heard that gusts were recorded of 109km/hr.

At SES it quickly became evident that we had a major operation on our hands. We asked for as many members as possible to respond. Calls were flooding in, way faster than anyone could handle. The wind was relentless and the damage was widespread with a number of houses loosing roofs, there were countless trees down along with the minor jobs.

Saturday morning I called it quits at 3.00am, but by 4.00pm I was heading back to SES for my next shift. The tally of jobs had grown to 291, big by any standard but not our worst. We had SES teams from all over Sydney assisting us. By the end of my shift (1.00am) we had only 57 outstanding jobs.

Today the operation continues, hopefully it'll all be complete this afternoon but thats for someone else to woory about. I'm having a day off.