Idiot proof phone and floods

See this little old phone?  Not very fancy, is it?  It’s a bit battered and well worn but let me tell you for longevity and reliability it wins the prize.  It does everything I need a cell phone to do, make calls and texts when I ask it to which isn’t often  and works well as an alarm clock.  And it’s idiot proof.

You can leave it sitting on a fence post from 2.30 pm on a Saturday until noon on Monday and not just in any old weather.  Between 9 am yesterday morning and 9 am this morning we’ve had 98 mms of rain (close to 4 inches). 

When I was preparing for bed last night I searched high and low for my phone/alarm clock.  When there was no ringing heard after I rang the number I thought it had dropped out of my pocket while we were watching the car rally on Saturday.  With the heavy rain at the time I thought it would be history and there wouldn’t be much point in looking for it.  But this morning I remembered where I had last used it – and where I had left it. 

Driving in to work this morning I was surprised by how flooded the creek was, told myself I must have slept through some really bad weather.   There was water over the road in a few places and I resolved to come home early if it started to rain heavily again.  I was hardly settled down to my daily tasks when the skies opened again.  Usually when there are floods around I ring my son to find out how bad it is here as the weather can be quite different in town but I thought my son, d-in-law and the kids had all left last night for a few days on Mt Ruapehu in the snow.    So I played it safe and headed back home.  I needn’t have bothered really.

 

Where the water had been over the road in the above spot a few hours earlier, there was still a bit of the road above water.  It won’t take much rain to bring it back up though.

Neighbours along the road had the boats out on either side of their access road. 

I was past the worst flooding parts of the road so could stop and enjoy the difference to the landscape. 

I often vow and declare I am going to take photos of the potholes approaching this bridge and send them in to the council road maintenance department.  The bridge is only one lane and it’s impossible to get on and off it without hitting a couple of those pot holes.

When I got to the corner the farm sits on, I was turning left to go up the side road to see how bad the flooding was down the back of the farm and thinking to myself I had best go for a walk down there when I got home to make sure my son had heard the heavy rain warning and moved the cattle off the lower pastures.  So I was quite surprised to see him on the farm bike. 

And this is what the back of the farm looked like.  The creek goes off to the left at this point but the water is rushing over the right hand bank and spreading across the farm. 

Danny was moving the cows off the farm down to the leased run-off.  A run-off is an additional piece of land, not usually directly connected with a farm.  Danny was lucky to find a near neighbour who wanted to lease out his farm, he grows crops there to supplement the dairy herd, runs the young stock there and moves stock there when he doesn’t want them ruining good grass by tramping it into mud.  (I find it quite hard to explain some things that every rural Kiwi just “knows”.)

So Dan missed out on the snow fields trip.  Such is life for a farmer!  You can ask your neighbour to do a few chores around the place while you are away but coping with floods is beyond what one expects of even the best of neighbours – and ours are the best.