The Situation

 

So here's a pictorial adventure of our Situation. Over December (19")and January to date (17") we have had a total 36" of rain, That's too much for most mountainside communities. That's a normal amount for an entire rain year. For us personally, all that rain has meant that on our road we have a mudslide.

This is how it looked after our neighbor with a tractor and front scooper cleaned up the slide including downed dead trees. We are lucky that it only partially blocked our small road. And that he had to get to work.

Some organisms are quite happy with all the excess moisture.

There are mushrooms all over the place.

I don't know the names of these, just admiring them from afar, and certainly not foraging and taking the risk of eating them.

Further up the road, we come to the main issue, the reason we've been out of power continuously since 1/4. Trees came down and hit the power lines, snapping them off the power pole. Small dog for scale.

This is on the other side of the crossed trees over the road. You can see the power line coming down diagonally toward the pavement.

The line is being pulled out of the road by the red caution tape so that one car can just pass by.

You can see a small red diagonal line, that's the red caution tape holding back the power line. We've been assured that it's not live, but you never know, especially when they're working on getting the power back on.

The rest of the mountain we live on has had their power restored, but we have not. I guess because it affects so few people on our small road we got prioritized down lower on the list. Understandable, but still very frustrating. We're lucky to have the Powerwalls and a great generator (and lots of extension cords), but it's getting very very old. And still the rain keeps coming.

Wrinkles In Flood

Storm Report Update: Power was finally back on last night at 7pm, so we ran around and did 2 loads of laundry, ran the dishwasher, etc. Then it went back out at midnight, so we're back on the generator. There were than four inches of rain over night so it's flooding all over here, and we're sort of cut off from driving due to trees down and mud slides. 

So I'm hunkering down, staying inside and sewing Pantone Project blocks and trying not to be too disaster-maven-ish. They're coming out a little wrinkly as you can see as I'm not using the iron, only the seam roller. The sewing machine doesn't take nearly as much power to run. 

How funny, out my second story window, I just saw our neighbor from down at the end of our street drive by with his tractor with the scooper on front to clear the mudslide partially blocking our road. Pretty handy to have a dude with that equipment around.

Rain, Rain Go Away

Not really of course. But so much at once, sheesh! Even Rexie is upset about it. Living in a borderline seasonal temperate rain-forest we are definitely used to having a lot of rain during the winter season. But this past few weeks was pretty extraordinary. More than 10" in just a few days and then 5" more spread out over the remainder of time. That plus the high winds made for a lot of excitement around here.

Trees were down and hanging in the power lines for more than a week. I ended up with power lines on top of my car at one point. Hey! Exciting! Yikes! The boys had two days off from school. During finals week even. We have "Rain Days" instead of "Snow Days" I guess. Too risky that everyone can get to and from school
safely, oh and that the power stays on for the whole school day.

Dark dramatic skies while in the eye of the storm.

And a small rainbow flare just for some color.

The saddest thing was the loss of our almond tree. It just fell over during one of the big windstorms. Luckily it missed all the cars and didn't block the driveway. It leaves quite the hole in our landscape, I really miss it.

I don't know if it was weak and fell over due to being infested with this stuff or not. Or because it was just such an old tree, at least 20 years old, not sure how old almond trees usually live to.

The worst thing is that it was about to burst into bloom. Such a glorious sight that I shall truly miss. I've got a bunch of branches inside in vases to hopefully catch a few last blossoms.

Now for some replacement tree shopping. Shall we go with almond again, or try something different?