Forgot to tell you about the other natural disaster

It's Saturday afternoon and 41 degrees - windy, smoky and very very hot. I am washing basically everything in the house that looks remotely dirty because they are drying in the time it takes me to get the next load done! It's amazing, all the sheets and towels are being whipped through in record time. I'm running the washing machine hose out onto the garden which is the only thing keeping it alive ... or at least some of it is still alive. Much of it has turned up its toes. This is the sun when I walked into work yesterday morning - this is not a good colour for a sun to be.

So the natural disaster I haven't mentioned is last week's hailstorm, which was staggering. I have always heard about the 'golf ball sized' hailstones but never actually seen them before, and christ on a bike I hope to never see them again. I had always thought that it would be like someone standing on your roof and tipping out a bucket of golf balls. It is not. It is like a test cricketer standing on your roof and throwing golf balls as hard as they possibly can at the ground. Those things have TERMINAL VELOCITY. When they hit the ground they are ANGRY.



The storm was a very narrow band that ripped through the centre of Canberra where blameless public servants were innocently going about their working lives. Parliament House copped it - there were knee high drifts of hail and the gardens were completely shredded. Somewhere there is amazing footage of the water features looking like they are boiling. Above is the ledge outside my window - I wanted to go outside to take a picture but I couldn't push the door open because the hail was piled up against it.

It also cut a path through the ANU where my husband works - every single car parked there or around the main government buildings was destroyed. Apparently the ANU carpark was like a bomb had gone off - windows shattered, wing mirrors smashed off, holes punched through skylights and cars filled up with hail from the back or front windows. Our car is an elderly tank so just had the front windscreen shattered but not smashed through, and all the panels were intact. Dented, but intact - the hail was coming in sideways at one point, so every panel got at least one little round ding. (I'd driven the new car so it was parked underground which I am super happy about).



So there were over 11,000 insurance claims made in Canberra, and the earliest insurance assessment we could get was yesterday so went out to a warehouse where they had set up lanes of cars - assessors with mobile phones triaging the cars then a bank of reps of all the insurance companies in a corner just churning them through. It was amazingly efficient - especially with ours because it is completely not worth repairing so they wrote it off on the spot. We left it with another fifty sad cars in the to-be-destroyed corner and they think we should have the money in a few days.



Now to find something else! Funnily enough there are no cars left in Canberra to buy, so I don't know what we are going to do. I'm sure there'll be something somewhere, but it is really not what I feel like doing right now. Our car was old but reliable, so not insured for very much, and we'll never get something for that price that we could trust. Could be worse - the guy in front of us at the insurance assessment had a beautiful new BMW with dints everywhere - they'll probably repair it and it will take months .... at least we should be back on the road in a week or two. Maybe.