Winter Storms are here

As I sit here typing and pecking away on my lappy, the rain is coming down in buckets around my house. This is the first set of really bad storms to hit California in quite a few years. It all started Thursday here. And they came rolling in as three separate storms. The first was just rain, the second was wind and rain, now this one is very very cold rain.

Well, let me retrace time here a bit. This was John last week of vacation. He had two weeks off, and wanted to go back to Occidental for Crab ciapino on Friday night. We had seen the sign on the side of the restaurant when we were there last week, and it sounded too good to pass up. I got tot come home early from work on Thursday night, so I went straight to bed and got some sleep so we could leave. It was raining when I left work, and the wind was starting to pick up. According to the forecast, the wind should have died down by the afternoon. So we packed up and left town.

We drove through torrential rains and wind out to the coast. We could feel the car blowing on the road and wondered about the people that sped by us, going way too fast for the conditions. Cars had skid off the road so many times, you would have thought that would give people a clue. But no. So John drove carefully and we had to detour around some water blocked roads, but we finally got tot our destination.

We hadn't heard about the weather conditions in Occidental, but I don't think it would have changed our minds. When we got to the hotel, we saw way too many cars in the parking lot. I had called Wednesday to see if we needed to make reservations and we were told no, we should be good. ahahhahahahaha. there was no power in the whole town, and if a light was on, it was because the people in that home or place of business had a generator. Our room had lights, but no heat. I did bring my laptop and the Planet Earth Set. So we had something to watch for a while. We also brought extra blankets, just in case. Good thing we did, cus it was cooooolllld.

Trees fell all over the place. One huge Douglas fir fell and landed on three separate homes, yes, it was that big. It came up out of the ground and literally landed on top of three homes. No one was hurt, Thank God. Only one family, a mother and daughter was in the third home. The mother had fallen asleep on the couch, and woke up at around 5:30 to the roof of her house about a foot from her face. Very scary stuff. It was a miracle she wasn't hurt. Her and her daughter were staying in the hotel. There were a lot of locals staying in the hotel. When we lefty this morning, they still had no power. From what I heard, there is around 100,000 people in California without power.

As we watch the news, we keep hearing about trees falling on homes and businesses. I hope none of the levees break up north this year. This happens every year, and it is very hard to correct.

OK, this is getting too long. Sorry about that. I could have gone on even more, but I will stop for now. John tells me it stopped raining. Yay. So see ya all later.