An Email to a Friend In CA

Trees down everywhere. I can hear chainsaws even as I write this.

We had 125,000 without power, but I think it's down under 50,000 now, perhaps fewer.

My eldest son left the house scoffing at the email warning I had just received. Five minutes later, as I fumbled to send a Text Message to him, he called and said he was turning back and that we should head to the basement. It was blue sky and calm where I stood in our front yard when I got that call.

I was outside to stop my middle son from driving over to pick up his girlfriend. I asked if he'd do it in twenty minutes or so, after the storm blew over. He was going to ignore me when my eldest son called. He then listened to reason and put his Corvette back into the garage.

As he came out of the garage, I stepped up onto the porch and wham, he, just behind me, was pelted by hailstones. It hit instantly, almost without warning, and there were 100 mph winds.

We ducked, my eldest made it back, and he got utterly soaked running from car to house. Meanwhile, my wife was at Jazzercise, and would be en route home soon. She has no cell phone. So I came upstairs to see how bad things were getting when I spotted large branches blocking the street. My middle son saw them too and ran out to clear the street so my wife wouldn't have to.

He was drenched as if he'd gone through a car wash, of course. He said it felt sort of like that, too. We watched him almost be blown over a couple times.

After this we ducked some more in the basement, and once it rolled over, we came up and my wife got home and we began clearing debris.

Two big van loads of debris from our yard alone was taken to the dump site. They had to establish sites all over Omaha and Bellevue for the incredible amount of stuff that was down.

At the top of our street, on the street intersecting it, in two spots, major branches blocked the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Cops announced no one should drive the rest of Friday night and into Saturday morning, so the clean-up crews could clear road and emergency crews deal with downed power lines and so on.

We were lucky, no power outage and no damage to vehicles or house, but all around us are damaged roofs, destroyed trees, and some local flooding.

Thank goodness climate instability is just a liberal myth, huh?

Now how about the fires out your way? Any of them affecting you?