7am Friday morning. I can hear and feel the pressure of Alfie. Twenty miles east of where I sit is the coastline. Fifty miles south is Brisbane. For the entire week there has been heavy off shore weather. Alfie has been taking his time getting to the front door.
The sky is menacingly grey. Thick, heavy, moving, alive in the sky.
The wind comes in gusts and flurries. Like a large fist, a gust will hit, shake the house, rattle the windows, make the wind chimes scream.
The dogs have a wary sense about them. When I woke early, they all came out to see me. Normally they’d laze around most the morning waiting for me to go outside. Today their nervousness was visible. I think the long night of gusts and flurries and creaks and groans has them unsettled.
My old house here is, for lack of better terms, flimsy. It is well built, but in standard QLD house building style, all houses here are not built for cold so no insulation and no double windows or thick door seals. Not like an old Iowan house at all. This old house moans and groans. Wind blows through the house, rattles the windows, shakes the walls. I tell the Grandkids it’s the ghosts, and some times it is, but most times its wind slipping through the plethora of cracks and openings.
We have spent the entire week waiting for Alfie to make land fall. I’m not 100% certain it has, yet. Nope, predicted for tomorrow, again… Info states landfall now for “later today/ early tomorrow”. After a week of getting wrong they aren’t predicting a time any more.
I know some places have seen over 100mm/8inches of rain. We haven’t gotten any measurable rainfall here, but then we are a-ways north of the system. I’ll be happy to not get dumped on, this time. I dont need the rain.
Early this past week landfall was predicted as far north as Bundaberg. At that time predictions called it a Cat 4 storm. Now it has been down graded to Cat 1-2. I think Alfie spent a lot of its energy spinning off shore. It’ll make landfall with less wind, but there will be a lot of rain. All that mass has to get dumped somewhere.
Not sure which is worse… hydrostatic forces or high winds? If the winds die down there will still be heaps of rain.
At times the wind simply stops. Things go clam, the air gets heavy and hot. Everything goes a bit quiet, then you hear it to the south-east, a rumble turning into a roar. It sounds like a train chugging up the valley. When it hits everything rattles and shakes everything.
The cattle appear unperturbed. I had expected them to head back to their home paddocks. I thought they’d feel the ‘something evil comes this way”. Must not be as bad as the dogs think. The cows leisurely do their grazing, mind their own business, have nothing to say today.
All makes me think of a song…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzgXx7Ol-Bg
more later
The Native Iowan 
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