LIghts out

The rain we had the other day caused blackouts in the local area which resulted in about 20,000 people not having electricity.   Power going out during a rainstorm is expected.  Either a tree will fall on a line, something will get hit by electricity, or my favorite, a car will speed on the oil slicked roads and hit a power pole.  We kept our electricity on throughout the rain, not even a flicker of power outage. 

Now this rain was two days ago.  Yesterday as I was driving to work I noticed a school bus stuck in the mud.  Around here the school bus pulls off the road about a foot or two.  One side of the bus is kept on the blacktop road.  The bus I saw forgot about keeping half of the bus on the road.  The entire bus was pulled into the dirt.  It sunk to the middle of the tires.  The tow truck to pull it out was huge.  The kids all got transferred off that bus and onto another one.  The kids thought it was a great adventure.  Girl and boy were on the "rescue" bus.  Prior to any rain the ground around here is hard as a rock.  In fact, if you need to dig during the summer time you better get a pickax, and even then it may not get you anything.  If you really need to dig you may as well find someone with a backhoe or a trencher.  But give us an inch of rain like we had and heavy vehicles will sink. 

Now that it's two days after the rain the ground is the perfect moisture level for pulling weeds.  They come out like they are anchored in sand.  Weeding is a breeze.  The sheep are in heaven with all the weeds they are getting fed.  I am also making a pile of weeds in the barn and plan on feeding them to the sheep later in the winter. 

In the garden today I pulled up about five pounds of potatoes and the same amount of turnips and carrots. I was able to dig out the potatoes with my hands.  For dinner Saturday night we are going to have a great vegetable dish of these three vegetables grilled in olive oil.  Should be good.


This morning the weather was beautiful albeit a little chilly.  The sky was blue, you could see the snow up in the Sierra, and not a rain cloud in the sky.  Around 7:00 the power went out.  It was quite unexpected.  Since I just read One Second After, you know what I did?  I went into the library room and picked up my cell phone to see if it still had power!  Sort of silly, I know.  But as I was walking into my library room, not acting with any sort of panic, I was thinking What If? Glad it was just a 20 minute outage.