Surviving the Storm of the Century

They (the weather people, the news people) had been warning us that the “Storm of the Century” with Hurricane force winds was on its way. For about ten days, they have been going on and on about how January 3-6 were going to be treacherous for all alive especially those of us in northern California. “Worse than the storms of early December in the Pacific northwest”, they warned.

WOW!!!!! For once, they had it pretty well pegged. Unbelievable. There were supposed to be three storm systems: one coming in Thursday afternoon; the second around midnight and the third on Saturday morning.

Right on cue, storm one arrived. Sometime yesterday afternoon between three and four it began to rain. Some wind, but mostly just breezy. Then about midnight the “house began to twitch” to mangle the movie quote. The dogs became unsettled. Fortunately, we were able to convince Boy to come in the house and stay, so I knew they were all safe. Woke up around 6, to gusty, but not usual for this time of year breezes. Had only lost one branch off the tree at the end of driveway by the time daylight arrived.

“It is going to get worse before it gets better”, the weatherman said. The snow levels are high. Really glad today was my day off. Well, you know the rest. It blew. Closed the airport for several hours; closed the freeway because of overturned big rigs; power lines down all over. Reported gusts upwards of 75mph.

BUT, we survived better than in years past. Will probably take several hours to clean up the tree limbs. Stopped counting at 40 branches, but only three are really big. So not bad.

Thank you, Thank you, SMUD and Direct TV. For the first time in years, we did not lose power. Yea, it fluctuated so much that is was mildly irritating, but never long enough to require resetting every clock in the joint. YEA! AND, only when the tree near the dish was in the process of losing a limb, did I lose any of my Direct TV signal. But it was only that mildly irritating pixel thing that the dish can do.

All-in-All, not a bad weathering of this storm. Now, we await the runoff. Last look at the weather channel, the area to the east of us received nearly 3 inches of rain in the last 24 hours. We will see.