The Frostilicus Perspective: One Mother Of A Storm (Or, "God Is On The Rag Again")

(Teehee @ my title)

Well, we had one mother of a storm last night. I took both video and pictures, and until I can find somewhere free (or cheap) that will host my video (as this blog is written on a less-than-shoestring budget) I'll just post some of the pics I took.

This is the storm as it approached. It didn't really look that threatening to begin with. But on the radar, it DID look threatening. A wide band of orange/red surrounded by blue and it was headed right for us. (a la South Park) Needless to say, the weather got a LOT worse for the next hour and a half or so.

This is the storm about 5-10 minutes later. As you can see, it was getting darker and darker outside, and it looked even more threatening. It was a good thing we had shut down the computers when we did, because about 3-5 minutes later, the power had flickered and then gone out. My housemate's bedroom window was open, and by then it had started raining, and the wind was so fierce that it was blowing the curtain up to the roof, and the rain had saturated her quilt, which, I might add, was on the opposite side of the room.

The storm crept up really fast. I'm talking calm one minute, chaos the next. It was only about 5:30pm, which is still daylight in summer here, and this is what it looked like outside:

The last time I saw a storm this bad was when I was living on the north side of Brisbane about 4 years ago. This is the first really bad storm we've had since living on the south side and the worst one so far this season. It knocked our power out for most of the night, and I heard from a friend that there were around 33,000 homes without power in the aftermath. There was no power in our street, the street behind us, or even the McDonald's which is on the other side of the main road 3 blocks away.

Apologies for the darkness of this picture. I did have the flash on, but it was really dark out there. I mostly went to video mode at this point, and I was shooting out of my back door. I was shooting out of the front door at first, but I started to get drenched really badly as the wind was blowing the rain towards me. I said at one point that it looked like the rain wasn't even touching the ground, it was travelling mostly sideways due to the strong winds. Looking at the palm trees in my neighbour's yard made it look like there was a cyclone happening.

The flash on my camera seems to react with the first object it sees that will reflect a flash. In the case of these 2 pictures, it was the raindrops that were falling, rather than the windswept teees I was trying to take pictures of.

Well, the storm had us indoors and had my housemate's 4 year old daughter freaking out a bit, but on the UPside of it, it cleaned our front screen door, to the point where it left mud on the front door!

Squeaky clean! :)

The weather afterwards cleared, although it was a little cloudy it was mostly still for the rest of the night in our area. We did get a rainbow, as well, which was noticed by our next door neighbour: