Well my friends, two weeks have passed since the Brisbane floods, and while things are still terribly dysfunctional, they are slowly starting to get better.

I have some links for you guys to take a look at if you'd like to see how my work fared. (Just click the links to view a larger image. )


Obviously, we look quite high and dry here. Take note of where the creeks are and how much green was there, now scroll down.





The first two photos were probably just after the peak of the flood. We discovered on the 15th when we went in to clean up that the water had reached 1m high on our second level, so the third photo more or less shows what we looked like underwater.







The day after. Lots of water still in places, but if there wasn't water, there was mud.





Our clean up day. I couldn't believe how nervous I was that morning... I had no idea what we were going to be driving into. This photo shows the mud level on our wall. Like I said before - that's 1 metre up on our second level.


My first look in my room.. Kinda makes my 'mess' look like nothing I couldn't manage now.


The other end of my room. Everything in my room had moved from its original position. Those shelves had toppled forwards, my CD racks had detached from the wall, my desk had slightly shifted, and that desk that's at the front of the photo was actually to the left of the photo up against the wall. The water had completely changed the direction of it.


Looking at the opposite building in our complex at the end of the day. You can also see the water mark clearly on their wall. Check out that sludge on the ground - it covered EVERYTHING within 30 centimetres of the ground.


One of the many trash piles we had in the complex. We had to throw all our furniture out, all the envelopes with samples from the filing cabinets, and everything except the hard drives from the computers. It was absolutely devastating.


I'm itching to get back there to see how things are looking now. We're currently working temporarily in another Snap store upstairs in their board room. It's hot and the air conditioner doesn't work properly, but it's somewhere and that's really what matters. We may even be back at Rocklea by the end of next week! I'm a bit sceptical that's the case, but we'll just have to wait and see. It's still a lot quicker than a lot of other places though - one of the other businesses in our complex won't be back until March/April. So like I said, we're very lucky!

So that's some positive news for us. The other bit of positive news I have is that next Thursday I have my college orientation day for my design course! I think the nerves will kick in that morning, but it's become a shining light of distraction for me, so I couldn't be happier that it's come along so quickly! Then a week and a half after that I start my classes, so then we'll really see how far I'm capable of pushing myself. It's a very good thing that this is done out of work hours, I'm not sure how I'd cope otherwise.

I've also deleted all comments, journals, news articles and faves/watches from my message centre. With everything being as overwhelming as it is at the moment, I've just kept the deviations and am in the process of commenting on as many of those as I can. I need to get back into the swing of 'normality', and as sad as some people think it is, dA is a huge part of my life. Commenting on deviations, journals and pages is something I've always done, and while the floods have been a huge distracting mess, I need some form of normality back again.

On that note, I'm off to start digging myself out of the deviations I've collected.