Current location:	Home plate
Current mood:	relieved

Powerless
As many of you know, we had a huge windstorm about a week and a half before Christmas. Hurricane force winds in Seattle of all places! Because there's a huge and lovely pine tree just outside my daughter's room, she slept on the living room couch. In my hot pink paisley sleeping bag that I had as a kid and wrapped myself up in to watch the very first moon landing [insert *sigh* for lost youth here]. She thought that was just fine.

The next morning, we woke to many branches and fallen trees. None of them were on our house or on the houses of the neighbors. And the power was out. Massively out. Everywhere in the city. In our isolated neighborhood, a maple tree had fallen across the feeder line, and hung tilted across the only road into the neighborhood. Katie's school was closed. The sky was that brilliant and innocent *who me?* shade of blue that only comes after a really violent storm.

We got out and did our bit for the neighborhood by clearing branches off the road, and cutting back the other, smaller cottonwood that had fallen over the road. I have these great loppers made by Florian One of the kind of fun/pain in the ass things about our neighborhood is that we get a lot less of the "tidying up" kind of city services, and we have to do that for ourselves a lot. It makes us feel a bit like intrepid urban pioneers.

We inspected the tree that had taken out our power from a respectful distance, then edged under it, holding Katie firmly by the hand. Then we flung branches off the road and inspected the damage wrought to our drainage ditch and road by the storm. The culvert at the bottom of the road was completely clogged with gravel and sand. Water was running over the road, down the hill and flooding out the concrete business down at the bottom of the hill (again). This happens a lot since the city, in it's infinite wisdom decided to clean out our ditch with a machine that broke up the blacktop at the bottom of the ditch. Now the culvert is clogged every fall.

The concrete company had set up bags of concrete partway across the road to divert the water. Which worked, sort of. A four inch deep layer of gravel and sand covered the intersection between our road and the main arterial. It was a most impressive mess. As we were admiring the devastation (what else can one do?) The concrete company guys came up. They told me that it wasn't just the water from the ditch, but that Puget Creek, our own personal lutefisk fishery, had overflowed as well. I vaguely remembered driving through about six inches of running water on the way up the hill. But I'd thought it had been the ditch. The creek would have had to have risen at least fifteen feet in order to do this. Wow!

Next Rock:Keeping warm, etc.