Life on the Beach: timber...

Wednesday night started with a great sushi dinner and ended with me tapping my heals together saying "There's no place like home..." The wind just wisked us away. Last Wednesday night was one of the worst windstorms in Pasadena since 1985 (or so our landlord told us). Our walk to and from dinner was totally calm, it was not until around 9:30pm did we notice the wind howling outside. We sat in my room with the blinds open (all of them...) and watched the trees being blown in every which direction.

When Brandon went to leave, we saw a tree-sized branch had fallen from the Oak in our driveway, our porch was littered with turned over chairs, and several of our fences were down. Brandon moved the branch so we could get in and out of our driveway, but I didn't want to risk parking my car under the trees, so we went to get a parking pass (all streets in Pasadena require a $3 permit parking between 2 and 6 AM... lame.) I guess I should have figured that no one is going to check parking passes when Pasadena was considered a State of Emergency... But, in my defense, the past four checks I have written were made out to the City of Pasadena for parking tickets, and darnit, I am not going to write another one.

I slept probably a total of 2 hours that night I thought the porch was going to collapse at any minute and the wind was shaking the trees all night long (cue Lionel Richie). I must say I felt a little thankful when I woke up the next morning and learned winds reached up to 97 mph, because I live in a glass fish bowl... any of these windows could have shattered on me...

We were lucky our power did not go out (except for about 20 seconds). Our displaced friend Jenna, our refugee, has been taking shelter here since Thursday morning, as the power refuses to turn back on at her house. Their casa is the ONLY one on their street that does not have power still. But, about 24,000 homes in Pasadena are still without power. I thought California was supposed to be getting ready for a huge earth quake or something... how has it taken them 7 days to turn power on after a windstorm.

The city is about as fast at cleaning up the mess as they are at getting the power back on. While the winds have died down, the streets are still littered with branches, trash and little flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.