Storms

We don't get storms very often in San Francisco, not even really in the Bay Area. Sure, it rains and might rain pretty hard, and gets a little windy at times but rarely do we have what came through on Thursday night, Friday morning/day.

Last night I was at work and it was cloudy and rainy. A generally blah day for the residents as they were all hiding out in their rooms for most of the day. But the wind started picking up at night and you could hear it rattling the windows and at points, shaking the very foundation of the house. One resident came to me and asked if we were going to be okay, would the house blow away. I assured her we would be quite fine, that I had experienced this before, which I had. Once or twice. And we were fine, even kept our power on, except for about five or ten minutes.

The rest of the Bay Area did not fare so well. One and half million people were out of power from here to the Central Valley (which is Sacramento and the main growing valley for California, I do believe). Apparently trucks were flipped on the highway, trees were down on cars and houses. There was a huge amount of snowfall up north and west of here.

When I drove home this morning, fortunately I had the truck and not the scooter, it was still very blustery, shaking Eucalyptus House and pelting it hard with heavy rain. I am so thankful I had the truck. I recently had a scooter accident (well, maybe a month or so ago) when it was wet (hit some train tracks going about 30-35 mph, slipped and just went down). Skinned and bruised up my knees pretty badly (I have pictures somewhere of my poor knee but I ended up never doing a blog post on the accident). So I get a little nervous when riding the scooter in the rain after that. But even so, even not being nervous would have made a different here because the wind could have just blown me over.

So driving in the truck was fine, if not a little bit being blown around the road. There were tree limbs down, one on a house (not big but definitely lying on top of the roof), some had come down on a few cars parked along Golden Gate Park and there were branches, leaves and tons of pine needles all over the road, debris everywhere. It looked like the aftermath of a small hurricane. I made it home and noticed the old scooter (the trusty little red one, not the nice new spiffy blue one) was on its side, apparently have been blown over, the poor thing. So, after parking and running squealing to the house (still raining!!), I ran squealing over to the scooter to right it and zip back inside, wet despite my dashing efforts.

I turned on the heaters and huddled down, listening to the rain and wind, feeling the house shake. Our power was on and fine although many places throughout the Bay Area had to shut down for the day due to the power outages. I couldn't see my Rosen worker because his power was out and he couldn't run the heater built into the massage table and the small foot heater. And trust me, this is not a good thing and I was not fussed that he rescheduled because that office can be cold without those things, especially when your naked with only a sheet over you, and the nice warm table is... very nice, I love it. I wish my bed had that option!! And it has been so very damn cold this winter season. Not as cold as from where I used to live in western North Carolina in the mountains but some how this cold out here is much worse to me than ten below with a foot of snow. It seems to get down into the marrow of the bones. Wrong place to live I guess. Need tropical island.

So that's the storm story. We're fine, my work and personal houses are fine. Our power is on and the heaters are working. That's really all I care about, the roof could be gone but if I have my heater, I'm happy.