The Fifth AT Deck in Progress

Tarot Orat said:

Okay, I will work on the 9 of swords tonight!

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gregory said:

That's everything done but 9 Wands, then ! YAY !
(reall I sent my hi-res card and updated texts on all my cards a little while ago !)

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Hola, guten Tag and naugahyde.

As if it wasn't bad enough being suddenly without not only my computer and all other electronics as well at a time when I probably owe someone an exchange and definitely owe a card to a collaborative deck with a debt to pay down before I could think about saving to replace them, but now my home has found itself in the path of a four-day-long tropical cyclone event that got lost and found itself in the non-tropical temperate zone I live in. I have had no power for days, and probably won't for another week. No hot foods. No showers. No hot drinks. No light. No charging of mobile phones. No mail.

The local lake is about four metres away from my back door, usually, and can only cope when the rivers and creeks that feed it are their usual stagnant, imperceptably-moving selves. Now that all of them have broken their banks and are running like Himalayan snow-melt torrents, the lake is rising fast. Perhaps it wishes to reclaim its seaweed that completely coats the roof and most of the walls of the building. Close as we usually are to its edge, we are about c two metres higher than its usual high-water mark. Plenty of margin, you'd think. Not so. The water is rising fast even though the weather seems over. The crisis is yet to come. I have piled low-lying areas of my library and collection on top of cupboards and beds, without a car, i do not have an exit strategy.

I count myself lucky. I am one of the uninjured ones, and so far I think I have somewhere dry to sleep - tonight is hours away, though, so we shall see. I also still have clean running water coming from the taps unlike most of the region, in the last hours the water supply has been cut off to whole suburbs.

My game-plan for the owing card had been to get a friend to photograph the original, which is three-dimensional, resize it, and email it and its text to Gregory to be passed on. Since the storm, the priority has changed. It's all about home-and-hearth now. As soon as my world is no longer in danger of being swallowed by the lake, I'll attend to other stuff.

I'm actually in remarkably good spirits, I surprise myself with my resilience. Chirpy though I am, though, my circumstances are quite grim still, and will be until the lake stops rising so fast.

I hear the sounds of distant scepticism. How is she communicating this if it's all true? Well, I'm on a borrowed tablet (which I loathe, can't wait to have proper technology again. It doesn't have a usb port, so I cant upload a photo through it. I travelled three and a half hours on four buses today, to get to a place where I have plugged a lot of chargers in, and I am refuelling the tablet, my stupid-phone and all my rechargeable AAA and AA batteries for torches and my portable radio, my one link with the outside world. By the time I commute back, it remains to be seen if I still have a home worthy of the word.

Of droughts and flooding rains, indeed. I can't believe I'm still laughing.

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Padma said:

Flames, I flipped through, and I saw your Wands card. Great job on it! She looks very determined!

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Flames said:

Hahaha...thanks for checking it out! You're very kind. Yup, that's exactly what I was going for -- a sense of determination and a "don't mess with me" attitude or "you'll be sorry you ever did."

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