Saturday, January 5, 2008

How was your weather day?

Just so wrong to look out of the windows yesterday at work and watch trees swaying way past where they usually sway and rain blowing sideways for hours. If you opened the door, you found yourself with a face full of rain, which at one point blew about 3 feet inside.

Enough rain came down that this was the view of part of the parking lot:
Don’t know if you can tell, but the water is at the sidewalk level. Basically, the concern was about the amount of water and how fast it arrived. And that was just one of the flooded parts. Include 2 other drains not draining and a couple areas of the streets around campus.


I watched 3 kids following their parents through the parking lot make detours right into the water (and none of them were younger than 8).

Soaked kids (but so far, no soaked books), flooded parking lots, one tree down, two short power outages, early dismissals, all after-school activities cancelled — oh, and 6 classes of wet third graders beginning a biography research project, plus the regularly scheduled 1st grade classes.

The decision was made to hold the 1st grade classes in their homerooms so the kids didn’t blow away on the trek down here. Good thing, because at one point, one of the more diminutive faculty members was almost blown off her feet.

Yes, I know that Californians can be wimpy about the weather, and that those of you who live elsewhere with "real weather" scoff at us, but this was a pretty extreme storm. The last storm that I can remember of this magnitude was when I was a kid visiting relatives in Houston and catching the edge of a hurricane. My one memory of that storm was literally hiding under a couch and hearing the wind pick up the potted plants and blowing them across the patio.

There is knitting involved in this tale!
After carefully driving to the fencing club with the Dork last evening, and seeing the southbound freeway traffic backed up during rush hour (3 lanes closed for emergency freeway sinkhole repair), I elected to just stay at the club. After finishing some grading, watching a few teenage boys try to play ping-pong with hard candy (the last ball was broken), I knit for about 2 hours on the left front of my Twist. I'm almost to the bind-off for the underarm. It's still a very addicting project! Hopefully, I'll finish the front by the end of the weekend.


Today - blood donation (finally, I've had to postpone 3 times), tow truck is picking up my old car (I'll miss it, but moving it out to the street last night made me realize how bad the engine had gotten), and go to the hardware store for fencing blade covers (3/4" PVC pipe).

3 comments:

(formerly) no-blog-rachel said...

I'm one of those 'Californians are weenies and don't know real weather' people but yesterday WAS wild! The rain didn't phase me (we needed it though maybe not all at once) but that wind was nasty. As we lost power for about 6 hours I was reading near the window when I suddenly realized the wind could easily send something right through it. Eventually I ended up strapping a flashlight to my head and knitting. Yep, it was purty.

Emy said...

Rachel reminded me of this - Ray ended up working from home yesterday, and in the morning he was sitting on the couch that sits perpendicular to a window. At one point, while listening to the winds whip stuff around the back yard, he slid away from the window...we were both definitely a little nervous that some tree branch would come flying through. And hey, I grew up in SE Virginia, with hurricane watches and warnings pretty much every year!

Marie said...

I really enjoyed the thunder and lightning. Being from the East Coast I really miss the summer thunderstorms, and it was great to get a little bit of that excitement!
Sounds like Twist is flying along - let's see some photos!