Crazy Windy Night

The wind was pretty nuts last night, you could hear it blowing against the house and I'm really surprised that the power stayed on all night. The reports on this mornings news showed streets in town where visibility was zero because of all the dirt and dust the wind was blowing around. Kind of like gritty heavy fog, only brown not gray.

I went out front a few times and could feel the fine dirt particles in the air and the plastic chairs out there were covered in a fine layer of dirt. Our black eyed susan on the trellis was leaning further and further over with each gust of wind and was laying almost completely on the ground when I went out to check on things this morning. I propped it back up where it's now leaning the other way by about a foot.

I don't know what time the rain started last night but it did wake me up and I cracked the window open a few inches so I could hear it while trying to go back to sleep.

We bought Genie a dog house igloo the other day, an igloo that would have taken me about 5 minutes to buy but Keith went to get it and it took him about an hour for some reason. He likes to debate purchases and take up salespeople's time with questions. We put her big quilt inside it along with a cat bed with sides and at first she didn't want to get in it but finally figured it all out. She stayed pretty dry all night as far as I could tell, the quilt was a little damp by the doorway but her bed was dry. Everything else in the back yard was soaked this morning, including her other blankets that were on chairs and such, a couple of them having blown clear across the yard. One of the plastic chairs was upended and about ten feet from where it was last night.

One big branch and lots of smaller ones came down from the tree out front, but everything else seems to have survived okay despite my visions of tree branches crashing through the house in the night.

I'm not even going to worry about sweeping things up out front today, it's supposed to rain on and off all day but fortunately the wind is gone. I'm also not going to clean anything up inside since we'll just track more dirt and mud inside each time we go in or out.

Keith called this morning from a siding outside of Barstow, they got a 3 am call for work and got the train running but then stopped about 30 miles later because of problems on the tracks going over the mountains back home. He'll probably sit there all day and end up getting a van ride back to town.