Northern California is being hit by a serious of major storms, the first of which rolled in on Thursday night. Tens of thousands of people are without power – especially along the coast – and freeways and bridges have been shut down at times, in part thanks to fierce winds blowing over some semi trucks.
And us here in the south bay? It’s not been so bad, actually. Debbi went to work on Friday (I took the week off) and seemed to avoid the worst of the traffic snarls (which all seemed to be in the north bay), except for hitting one backup at the very end of her drive home. I was worried that our back yard might flood at times, but it turned out that the rain was just coming down slightly faster than it could be absorbed into the ground, but it never got any higher than when I first got concerned. It helps that we haven’t had much rain recently, so the ground is able to suck up a lot of water. Palo Alto’s Creek Monitor shows that the creeks are far from full, too.
It got windy enough to blow down some small branches (or large branches, in bbum’s case) and a sales sign at a nearby condo complex, but that’s about it. We had a couple of power outages Friday morning, the first before I got up, and the second while I was out and about, both of which I noticed only because clocks were flashing when I got back.
Really, the worst we’ve suffered is that our cable TV is out today. I called Comcast, got put on hold for 25 minutes, and gave up. If it persists, I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bummer to be missing the football playoffs, but you can’t have everything in a rainstorm.
And the rain didn’t stop me from being productive the last two days: I sold a whole bunch of CDs to Rasputin Music, and a box of books to BookBuyers. We took down and put away our Christmas lights from outside today, too. And of course I made my weekly comic book run. Tomorrow we might drop some stuff off in our storage unit.
It sounds like it’s going to keep raining through Wednesday or later, which probably means no frisbee on Monday. But if yesterday was the worst of it, then it should be okay.
Especially if our TV comes back on.
Your neck of the woods fared better than ours.
Pretty much everything between De Anza and our house (and beyond, as I discovered) was without power. The drive home involved many a dead stoplight. Most people were clued into the “treat it like a 4 way stop” rule, but not all. Only the major shopping centers had power.
The winds were strong enough that it appears to have ever so slightly bent the rollers on one of our sliding glass doors. It no longer slides with quite the same alacrity as before.
We were without power a total of about 13 hours.
Driving around the area today, there were lots of trees and major branches down. Many roads had clearly been blocked before, but were cleared by today. There were still a handful of stoplights out.
Today’s rains were heavy, but completely pleasant, by comparison.