2008-01-04 Monster storm

Monster storm system started here in California last night. I'd picked up Eric McC. from the airport yesterday, he parked his car in our driveway, and it broke down while he was trying to drive out, so he ended up staying at the house last night. Turns out this was a good thing, because extra hands around both houses today are likely to be needed. Last night we woke up to the sounds of assorted stuff falling (including what sounded like at least one big-ass tree, far enough off that we didn't get out of bed to deal with it), and the appliances doing weird stuff in response to a wacky electrical situation, by morning the batteries had run down on the UPS that runs the network.

I got up at a reasonable hour to drive to the new house to meet up with the floor guys (where we decided to re-floor the tiled section just inside the main entrance) and do what I could there. I ended up ripping out some of the "spiff it up to sell it" landscaping on the uphill side to make sure that there was a good channel, and, of course, setting up the sump pump. We need to dig in some real drains up there, and do a permanent installation for the sump pump, the lot is flat enough that there's standing water all over it and, unfortunately, that includes several inches throughout the crawl space. Right now the sump pump is set up as a "drape a house out the garage", that's not going to be a long-term solution, so we need to get a permit to tear up the sidewalk to do a drain to the storm gutters, and plumb it.

The drive up involved a lot of standing water, rock slides and downed tree limbs, and at least one car that looked that it might no longer be driveable under a downed tree in Nicasio, but apparently the front way was worse, lots of bad news out on route 101, Golden Gate Transit suspended bus service because of flooding on 101, and there were lots of other problems. The radio also said that PG&E wasn't even going to try to start repairs until the winds died down a bit.

Meanwhile, the sanded floors look awesome, if we go with a clear finish they'll be beautiful. Now to figure out how we put up replacement hardwood baseboards without totally breaking the bank.

Category: Dan Lyke life Category: 10 Mission