All I've got is a photograph

Ten days ago Mr Wombat and I ventured out of our home in the hills and drove down to a shopping centre in Carrum Downs. I needed to post out a parcel so went straight into the post office to post it. About 15 minutes later we decided to leave and headed out to the car. When we got to where the car was parked, the car had been stolen, this was devastating in itself as we had traveled some 50km away from our home (and we have no trains in our little part of the world unless you call a steam train transport) we also don't have a second car on the road yet and so we were facing a very tough time without transport. On top of this, I had brought along my yarn the Paradiso Gembrook (I had intended to show a friend that I had learnt to spin) which I left in the car. I was shattered.
We finally started to head towards Mr Wombats work where we could pick up a company car to use whilst we sorted ourselves out, but this particular day was a day that Melbourne experienced four seasons in one day (something Melbourne is famous for).

As we got off the train, the heavens opened and torrential rain literally poured from the sky, and within minutes Mr Wombat and I had been drenched to the skin.

After finally getting home (some 4 hours later) we discovered that lightning had knocked out our power, phone and Internet. Power was quickly restored, but a phone call (via public phone) to the phone company said that because of the storms our phone would not be restored until after the weekend, now for us this was bad bad news, because not only is it our link to the outside world I live in a high fire risk area and without the phone if there was a fire I could not alert people to the fact there was a fire and I would be in danger of not being able to escape.

Luckily the weather over the weekend was mild and so the fire danger was minimal. The following Monday, I waited all day, but no telephone man showed and so Monday night I rang the phone people again.

I was told because of the storm damage in the area there was a huge workload for the phone company and my phone fixing had been deferred until a later date (Jan 8th was the date they said ) now normally I would have waited, but I really really felt that this was dangerous to me and the other residents in my neighborhood fire is our biggest threat as there are huge areas of natural bush surrounding us and said so to the phone rep.

Finally after much arguing and pleading from me, the phone rep agreed to send out a technician to see if he could fix the phone line.

So 24 hours later a technician turned up to check the phone, five minutes later we had phone and Internet connection (the high winds of the storm had loosened the connections) and we had contact with the outside world.

We immediately rang the police to find out if our car had been found (it had) and currently its in the police holding yard (yay) don't know if the car is damaged (the police said the car doesn't look damaged) and they also say that nothing is missing from the car so I'm hoping my yarn is still in the car we will have to wait for the police holding yards to be open after the New Year holidays before we can retrieve the car. I am hoping that 2008 turns out to be a better year for Mr Wombat and myself as 2007 had been one long horrible year for us.
Roll on 2008!