On 08/01/2007, at 6:09 AM, Alex Fisher wrote:
On Sunday 07 January 2007 22:00, Clytie Siddall wrote:Hi everyone :) I'm very sorry I haven't been able to respond to your mails sooner. Things have been happening, including a hurricane.O saw that on the news here. Tornadoes in Australia are starting to hit populated ares more frequently these days. I gather you survived it OK.
We were lucky. One mile down the road was the worst damage. Apart from a loud "clang!" when someone's roofing iron arrived in our backyard, and the even louder plaints of a teenager deprived of electricity, we got through OK. ;)
Lots of wind and rain, though. Quite a spectacle. There are twenty houses gone close by, and huge trees uprooted. We were without power for most of the day, until late. Yet go another mile to the West, and everything was untouched. It took out all the power from this point East, though. My husband was up at our local ISP, coddling the UPS and then watching the generator (the joys of being a sysop ;) ). He had to go to another town West of here to get more petrol to keep it running. The petrol pumps in the town couldn't work without electricity.
It reminds you how much you rely on electric power. We've been thinking about putting in solar panels, and this is a strong argument to do so. We would at least have had the batteries, and once the storm moved on, the sun came out again. But the power lines were down, and a whole section of the highway destroyed. So no power for many hours.
I didn't realize the newmongers had seized on the storm like that. My poor son rang up from Adelaide in a panic. Pete's very elderly and sick father also rang up, worried. I hope the news people think the advertizing money is worth the anxiety they cause.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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