Deja Vu?

I actually went to bed before midnight tonight ... but I then I got up again (at about 1:30am) because it was hot, and then when the change in the weather finally arrived (not long after I went to bed) it was a kind of weird gusty wind that resulted in the fact that I was still wide awake and all this stuff was buzzing around and around in my head ...

Almost 3 years ago, there was a series of events that culminated in a disaster that changed many people's lives, and changed Canberra ...
Instead of Canberra just being "that capital city that the government built, that we happen to live/work in", it became "home" ... and something was threatening to take it away from us - the bushfires came to town!
(for those who don't live in these parts, or have been under a rock for the last few years , there were several bad bushfires in several areas of Australia in January 2003 ... and on the 18th of January, with stinking hot weather and strong winds, a rather large bushfire burnt it's way into seveal suburbs of Canberra resulting in the loss of 4 human lives, countless animal lives, quite a lot of houses and large areas of forest and bushland, and for some people it was a nightmare that still wakes them up at night ... there is a website with a LOT of photos taken during and just after the fires in Canberra - someone created it and started collecting photos quite soon after the fires, and the site is still there - http://canberrafires.xsnet.org/ )


Today we had a reminder of those events ...

yes - it is that time of year again ... stinking hot dry windy weather and there are several bushfires burning in various parts of Australia ... and one bushfire was close enough (actually a "safe", for us, distance away near Crookwell), and in the right direction from us, that we had a lot of smoke blow over Canberra in the afternoon, and on our side of town at least, we were also treated to a rain of bits of burnt grass and stuff ...

... I think it has probably brought back some memories for a lot of people ... it has for at least one other person I know, and it did for me - and I don't even live in one of the areas that were worst affected, so I didn't have to go through the nightmare that people in some areas of town did (an afternoon where the fires burnt houses around them, and the smoke made it dark as night, and they had to put out fires in their yards all that afternoon and then either evacuate themselves to a refuge or friends place or live for up to a week with no power or telephones ...)

Of course there are some people who either just have or are still now going through the same kind of thing - there are several bushfires that have destroyed houses/property/bushland/etc and/or are still raging in several areas of Australia ... I guess it is kind of a fact of life here, that in the hot dry summers we often have bushfires ...

During and after the fires in Canberra, I wrote a few strange e-mails/etc, about what was happening and how I felt at the time ... and I have also kept a couple of e-mails that were written by friends who wrote about some things that they probably never want to have to see/live through again ... and when I started this blog, at least some of those were one of the things I was planning to eventually put in it ... so maybe now is as good a time as any?


it is now more than 2 hours since I started typing this stuff - lol
- I have been getting "lost" reading all those saved e-mails ... it kind of interesting, and weird, reading all that stuff again now ...

I might stick a few bits and peices of that stuff in here shortly (or if not now, then sometime in the next day or 3 maybe) ... but first ... I just remembered something else i was going to post about too (because i had one part of it saved in an e-mail in my drafts folder so I could find it and copy it into here ... lol)