We managed to recover the missing piece of the puzzle from the dog today and the bookcase is complete!

Ahhhh, the joys of flatpack furniture. We just bought two bookcase/wall units from Oz Design called Wangaratta or West Wyalong or something. Had they come from Ikea (Swedish for poor service) they would have had strange names like kuksugare or fittaö Anyway, these things are designed to explode across the room as soon as you open the box and then it takes about three hours to make sure you have the 20,000 pieces that are 3mm long. Once that is all in place you work your way through the instructions written in clear Chinglish (or Swedeglish) and 3 days later end up with something that looks like a different item in the catalogue.
There are professional flatpack furniture assemblers who will come to your house and do this. Yes, people actually make a living out of it. When you ring for a quote, if you have already started building the furniture they also include the cost of a marriage counsellor.
Anyway, last night we had a crack at the second piece of furniture and it all looked to be going well. The bookcase was assembled and only the small doors needed to go on two of the compartments. It was at this time we discovered the danger of sorting the pieces on the floor.
The doors required small round plastic hinge bushes to be placed in the wood to hold the doors in place. They are about the same size, colour, shape (and possibly taste) of the kibble that we feed the dog. Jules had taken great interest in our work and seems to have internalised some of it. So now we have to follow the dog around for 48 hours to await the delivery of the missing piece. Oh crap!

As I write this, the skies are black, the thunder is shaking the windows and the rain is pouring down. Another summer thunderstorm has hit the city with up to 38mm falling within an hour. No doubt the emergency calls to SES will soon follow.

Sydney has endured a continuous series of storms which began on 4 December when a large hailstorm hit Blacktown in the outer west. Thousands of roofs were destroyed and some streets did not have an undamaged house. With the huge amount of work to be done and the upcoming Xmas holidays, few of the houses were fixed immediately and Blacktown was subsequently hit by another windstorm (which damaged many of the tarps) and further rainstorms. throughout December and January. I have now been to Blacktown more times in the last 2 months than in my whole life.

Last week it was the turn of Bankstown and Liverpool, high winds and hail brought down trees, damaged roofs and soaked the ground to capacity. When record downpours fell the following week, there was widespread flooding, some road closure and a few evacuations. The rain stopped just before the George River overflowed and river levels dropped to safe by the end of the day.

With the rain we are having now, the poor people of Blacktown will be enduring more leaking roofs and soggy yards. Just another summer in Sydney.