As I have implied before, you don't mess with storm season.

And as I have explicitly stated before, I have broken my own rule.

Storms in Brisbane get fierce. They roll in from the west, typically around 4pm, a humid onslaught that begins with day turning into night, dark purple and green clouds which are basically stage one in GET THE HECK INDOORS.

The thunder peals and sometimes lightning is seen piercing the murky soup above.

Then the wind picks up. It usually turns your Mary Poppins inside out while the rain begins.

The rain slams us all of a sudden in the wet season, big fat rain as Forrest Gump put it, that falls straight down in enormous splashes on the sidewalk.

Yesterday was like this only the day was sandwiched between two massive storm cells. Saturday night was punctuated by thunder which rolled in slow and then at night picked up like shotgun blasts, scaring the mustard out of Mrs Speech.

Sunday morning it died down. I went out and got Mrs Speech some breakfast. By late morning the sky was a beautiful blue and the ground dried rapidly.

By Late afternoon, it was at it again. We turned the lights on early and waited. The wind and the rain hit and we did it all over again.

Does the weather have to be so schizophrenic?

Sorry, East Coast.

Yeah, I know...it's tough. When weather like that hits you. When houses are flooded and only the roofs can see the sky. When the lights go out for you and the forty thousand people around you. When the rain whips you in the faces and dares you to keep walking even though you know you should turn back.

Sorry 'bout that. Y'know, soggy carpets and moulded walls. Streets filled with the waterlogged detritus of other people's lives and whatever that is, that thing over there. Don't touch it.

Don't swim in the water if you're flooded. Just don't.

Sorry for the disruptions to your lives, East Coast. The lack of power, the lack of basic supplies (if you weren't able to stock up), the inability to get to your family because the roads are gone.

Don't try to drive that road because the water doesn't look too deep. Just don't.

Sorry 'bout the economic damage: as though the economy wasn't struggling enough, now billions more are gone. Some of you will face horrible financial pressures. You'll discover fine print in your insurance policies that you didn't know was there. You'll be bunking with family members for longer than you thought. Buying food will be difficult. Christmas will be spartan.

Sorry, East Coast.

For the lack of supplies in your area, for the fights with the other guy over that thing in the supermarket, for the charlatans trying to gouge you because it's the way the market works...supply and demand, fella is an acceptable excuse to charge someone forty bucks for a flashlight. Sorry 'bout the animosity.

Sorry for your waterlogged cars, for the fire which somehow was begun by violent wet weather, for the tourist dollars gone, for your business which has been destroyed, for the pets that died, for the worry about whether xyz person was okay because you can't call them.

Sorry for all the lives that have been lost. That's harsh.

We (In Brisbane) did this almost two years ago. It was horrible. Rain bands from Tropical Cyclone Tasha soaked the state of Queensland and every area got it good. Rockhampton, Gladstone, Bundaberg, the Sunshine Coast, even inland, to places like Toowoomba.

Cars were washed away like toys, roofs became islands in the muck, and Brisbane got hit.

Brisbane sits on a snakey river in the Moreton Bay region. Authorities had to control-release water from Wivenhoe Dam (which was at 191% of capacity) and the river swelled and eventually flooded multiple inner city suburbs. 20,000 homes went under a marsh of brown water.

The total cost was about $30bn. But worse, 38 people were confirmed dead with 6 missing. It was a pretty ordinary start to 2011.

Mrs Speech and I avoided it; our suburb sits substantially south of the city. The worst we endured was a waterlogged backyard and the whomp-whomp-whomp of the aid choppers which flew overhead every twenty minutes.

But we feel for you, East Coast. Queenslanders did it tough. Now you guys are doing it tough, too.

You're gonna find it hard to pick up the pieces but you'll manage. You might grieve for a bit, or maybe you just need to put some new carpet on credit as you go find a new insurance agency. But you'll clean up.

The tourists'll come back, too. Don't you worry about that. Everyone wants to see Atlantic City, because of Boardwalk Empire.

Just hang in there for a bit, East Coast. The lights, they're gonna come back on.

In the meantime, sorry.

So we went for another walk today.

It was mid-afternoon and the BOM had predicted rain and possible storms. I checked the radar, and saw a big patch of yellow, red and black (the colours representing the strongest weather) coming from the west.

"Hey Honey, let's go for a walk," said I gleefully. Knew we could beat the weather.

Bad bad bad bad bad bad idea.

You know it's a bad idea when you're praying your wife and you won't get sizzled by lightning while desperately recalling Job 38:35.

It all seemed innocuous enough. We headed down the bikeway near our house (see pics here), at a brisk pace with white cloud above and greying cloud to the south-west. No biggie.

Up we headed into Broadwater Park, where I told Mrs Speech that I would like to continue down the bikeway. That is, further away from our house. She balked. I talked. We walked (back toward our house).

We hit Broadwater Road and she suggested we watch the cars for any wetness as a sign of rain nearby. Clever girl. I wouldn't have thought of that one. The clouds began to close in.

Ham Road is a horrible horrible hill, because it inevitably comes at the end of a walk, when you're already tired, and forces you to climb an incline for about 150 metres.

It's even worse when you can see the gathering storm clouds and your already-hurting legs unconsciously move much much faster as you wide-eyed-with-anxiety ponder what would happen if ten billion volts of electricity passed through you? Would it be like in that John Travolta movie? Would my IQ increase 100 points and suddenly I've figured out how my Wii can power my entire house while running on a glass of orange juice?

These are things you think about as the lightning escapes the clouds and discharges its fury. And then again, and again.

And still even as I was kicking myself for my stupidity, I wasn't done.

We had brought some cash with us because we needed a couple things from the shops. Nothing terribly important. But as we turned left on to Mount Gravatt-Capalaba Road and put the storm to our backs, my confidence increased. I was now looking at white cloud instead of dark grey. I didn't know how fast storms moved.

Five minutes later we exited the shops with the storm directly over us.

*aaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuugggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We crossed the road and speed-walked down the hill to our unit complex. Mrs Speech ran to our unit, the pattering rain harbouring horrible horrible thoughts that had left John Travolta and turned to what I would smell like as a piece of crispy bacon. I ran a little too.

We made it though. We thanked the Lord a lot.

And inside we cooled down, and the first storm of storm season 2012 passed in about twenty minutes.

There'll be more.

But I won't be walking in them, 'guarantee you that.

So today Mrs Speech and I went for another of our walks - we were out about two hours. The rain threatened (but that's all it does - we have had .2mm rain in two months) but didn't break on us, which was nice. In fact, the monstrous thick cumulonimbus clouds thinned above our house by the time we returned, and I ended up with a sunburned face.

We actually had a little nature hike thing going on, walking the length of the section of the bikeway that runs through our area, through the bushland which swallows it up. We came across a scrub turkey, scratching at a dirt hill as though foraging for food (maybe it has young somewhere near? It is spring here after all). Could be the same one we saw the other day. One day we'll catch it. Din-dins!

Also, about thirty minutes into our walk, Mrs Speech clutched my hand in a grip of cold icy fear, and I stopped in my tracks, and looked at a massive lizard which lay on the stump of an overturned tree. They're incredibly skittish and this one moved as we passed. I managed to tip toe close and get some pictures though. Then he skittered away. He was just getting some sun I guess.


Today we began gearing up for Mrs Speech's new Etsy shop - Pink Scissor Designs - which she will use to sell her crafty creations. We've not put much up yet - just her Jesse Tree Ornaments, but more is to come. I personally am excited by Christmas already and the Jesse Tree Ornaments are putting me even more in that frame of mind. We took some photos today of what she has done, and broke out our smaller Christmas tree to hang them on.

We've put our Christmas tree up in September.

We got an interesting call today. There's a phenomenon lately here in Australia, maybe in some other western countries, where the Indians call you, and telling you they're calling from "Windows Technical Department". The line's always really shabby, it's like they're on a walkie talkie from Big W. I've never been too far with them but I read a couple years ago that their thing is to get you to look at a certain folder in Windows on your computer. Then, they tut-tut while they tell you that they can see you have lots of malware installed on your computer, and to clean it, please go to xyz website where of course, you can download a program to get rid of all your nasty malware.

What you download puts malware on your computer.

Usually I laugh uproariously at them until they hang up but this time I had a little fun. I asked the woman on the phone if she could hang on. She said yes and I dumped the phone in the next room and made a point to forget about it.

Five minutes later I put the phone to my ear and she was still there. Some twenty minutes later Mrs Speech hung the phone up. Mrs Speech didn't seem all that happy with me, but I say anyone who cold-calls you, attempts to defraud you out of your computer security and gives you a virus, while treating you like an idiot who just fell out of that tree over there, the really big one...gets what they ask for.

That was our day!