Well actually Monday morning spectator. It’s 11:00 am on Monday, February 7, and we are watching the Super Bowl, live, on Australian television. How weird is that? To celebrate, I made a batch of pretzels but the beer may have to wait for a more reasonable hour of day. The advertising ads don’t compare and are, in fact, rather depressing.

The most common one is for “Senior Insurance” to lure people over 50 to sign up for insurance to pay for funeral costs. Benefits up to $15,000, no medical needed. Nice and uplifting for the game. I’ll get my cane and hobble up the hill later today. How cute was Cameron Diaz feeding popcorn to A. Rod? It’s just not the same without the E*Trade commercials or a bet riding on the game, or at least those box scores for each period (or is that quarter?).

We have watched cricket here without really having a clue as to what was going on, and, apparently, the match can last for days.

Enough of spectating, time to get back to action. The garden produced the perfect tomato today. I’m starting to tidy it up again and make sure it’s in good condition for the next caretakers. The only trouble is we have had record cold temperatures and I just planted a bunch of seedlings. They’re out there shivering and blowing in the wind.  

After dinner, we fired up the computer to watch the American Super Bowl ads. Seems like a strange activity but it was a way to do what family and friends were doing at home. We don’t want to miss out on pop culture during our three months. We had to stop because the colors outside were incredible, bright orange and pink as some clouds and a brief shower passed by. Then a rainbow at the end and a glorious sunset.

  

Our one official job is to check the rain gauge daily and report it by fax to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, fondly referred to as BOM. It rained so much yesterday, we read and emptied the gauge several times. This morning, while Tim walked the lighthouse road, in the pouring rain to see how the ditch drainage work held up, I took the fourth and final reading: a whopping 60.0 mm of rain in 24 hours: 2.4 inches. I don’t track the rain at home so don’t know how it compares but it was coming down thunderously. When I looked through the rain records for Deal Island, I found it is the most rain recorded in one day since 2009 when they had 79 mm.

As a result, we have clothes and the flag hanging up to dry and buckets strategically placed throughout the house to catch leaks.

When I needed drinking water for coffee this morning, I had to don my foulies to go out to the water tank. I probably should have just let the pot outside to catch the rain directly instead of runoff from the roof.

This means I don’t have to water the garden today and I can work on my knitting and spinning. I’m finishing a pair of socks and spinning some alpaca. But first, time for another batch of yogurt.

Here’s how the sky looked yesterday before the rains began. Maybe it will look that way again tomorrow.