Stormy Seattle...

You may have heard that we've had some weather trouble around here recently. The news said that wind gusts went up as high as 135mph on Thursday night...
This is a picture of the 20-25' branch that feel on my house during the windstorm on Thursday night....

We knew that a bad storm was coming, so being the geek I am, I left work at 5pm on Thursday to charge up my portable DVD players so I'd have entertainment... I also brought a bunch of firewood into the garage so that it would be easier to keep the fireplace going. Driving home was terrible - the rain was coming down so hard that even having the windshield wipers on top speed wasn't enough. It was the worst rain I've ever seen. It calmed down around 9 or so and I ran out to the grocery store and loaded up on soup and chips (hey, they don't require refrigeration!).

The winds started really picking up around 10pm. It sounded really bad and things kept falling and hitting the roof and the sides of the house. There were some really loud booms but I couldn't figure out what they were. There was no way I was going to sleep - the tv said that trees were falling on people's houses and killing them in their cars. Lost electricity around 1am. Finally fell asleep around 4 and woke up around 7am. It wasn't too bad - no electricity, but I have lots of flashlights and batteries (to my chagrin, I was actually short on D batteries so my battery powered (black & white) tv wouldn't work. I hung out and read my book and it was kinda ok.

I finally decided to drive around and take some pictures (click on the picture above for more). It was really bad. I live in an area that has a lot of very large very old trees and many of them came down and took down power lines (see pix for more details). I realized this wasn't going to be resolved quickly and made my way to a hardware store. Actually, I saw a line outside the hardware store and decided to get in line and get whatever they were getting cause I wasn't sure what I was missing. Of course, I remembered the D batteries and I also picked up Sterno and a tiny little Sterno stove thingy so that I could cook soup. Traffic was terrible because all the lights were out and you had to make you way around the trees and branches all over the place.

I was ok last night. Kept the fire going all day, read my book, watched the tv (hey, it gets 2 channels!) and found out that more than a million people were without electricity, watched "WordPlay" - pretty good documentary, but serious crossword people are seriously odd. I made soup on the grill outside cause it has a burner and it's way stronger than the sterno and discovered that every candle I have is scented. You get enough of them burning and the room has an undescribable odor...

Fell asleep on the couch in front of the fireplace around 8:30 last night. Woke up at 7:30 this morning and it was freezing! I checked my thermostat and it was 45 degrees in the house. Built a fire first thing. Went for a drive today to charge my phone and portable DVD player and got an email on the phone that power was on at work, so I have evacuated here for a while. I figure I can play on the internet and make calls n stuff and stay warm. My neighbor says that we always get power turned back on last so it probably won't get back on today. Hoping for tomorrow...

The good news is I am well, Gus is lying here beside me sleeping and my house is fine. I have everything I need. I'm a little miserable and bored, but compared to what some people are going through I feel really fortunate.