Well!

 I haven't posted for a week because of this:

My painting series is going to be called 'Storms of Life' but this was a real-life storm. A mini tornado, in fact. It raged through Adelaide on Saturday November 12th, and our suburb was one of the worst hit. For fifteen minutes there was horizontal rain, the wind roared, and trees were flying. The power went out and we didn't get ours back again until Thursday afternoon, hence the lack of blogging.

We were lucky in that the branch that fell from our tree fell between our house and next door's garage, only taking the guttering off the side of the house. This is a small piece of tree compared with some of the ones we saw that had been broken off and flung around. That piece of wood in the bottom right of the picture is actually impaled in the ground. The branch that fell on the roof didn't go through so we are incredibly thankful. 

We took a walk around the neighbourhood, as did many others, just an hour later and the emergency services had already chopped up and removed several large trees from where they had fallen across the road and broken down power-lines. I couldn't believe the size of some of the trees that had been ripped up - these were well-established trees with trunks over half a metre in diameter. The really odd thing was that nothing moved on our patio, and friends have lots of potted plants that weren't touched either. They said they saw two funnels going down their road and there is a tree that was broken by twisting because you can see the way it has splintered. 

Scary. Amazing. Glad it wasn't worse.

I'll be back properly next week.