Tuesday, February 10, 2009

[fireball] run when it comes at you



Let's face it - I'm not getting much blogging done. What was a slowdown has almost become a hiatus but I do plan to be back. The issue is not things to blog about.

The novels I'm revamping don't mean a lot to most readers but they do to me and I've almost finished the 2nd one, which needed to be virtually rewritten. It does seem more exciting now. The 3rd is going to be tough because it involves combining all the remaining bits and pieces into a smooth narrative which you could still stand reading after the first two.

Anyway, enough on that.

I see they have their annual fires in Oz. Every country has its traditional trouble - California its tremors, Britain the wrong snow, Australia its bushfires. This particular lot of fires seem bad, even by Australian standards:

The fire that dropped from the sky on Saturday plunged us into a new reality. Environmental conditions had changed drastically before our eyes, but the advice to the community had remained the same. Even on Saturday the urgent words were streaming out of the radio: Be safe! Stay inside!

Had the fireballs come as far as our place our hoses and pumps and cotton clothes and every other piece of paraphernalia we had accumulated (such as wet mops and buckets and a bath full of water) would have counted for nothing.

If you've never been close to one of these, they are not nice. As the article points out, when that thing comes your way, all the nice little things like damping the gutters, staying inside and all that - you still get consumed in a fireball. People did.

And what did I walk home to from the shop last evening? Mist. British mist!

2 comments:

  1. I have not been close to fireballs like that, but I have been close on two occasions to enormous fires :-/

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