Soggy New Year

A rainy, windy start to the new year. The north bay has been drenched in rain: Downtown Napa flooded when the Napa River overflowed its banks, and the Russian River flooded even higher, drenching Guerneville and other areas. Mudslides have also been a problem. The peninsula has not been hit as hard, although the San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto threatened to flood, and high winds have damaged or knocked over some trees. My own city has been relatively lightly hit, with some steady rain that's rarely been heavy, and no flooding that I know of. Last night we walked over to the creek about a block from my house, and I estimated that it's only about 1/3 full.

(I understand that when my house was built it was in a flood zone, but improvements to the area since then have remedied that state, and the closest flood zone is now several blocks away.)

Some areas have had power outages, but we haven't had any here. My ISP, Sonic.net, however, is up in Santa Rosa, and my Internet connectivity has lagged at times, possibly due to issues getting to the Domain Name Servers at Sonic's physical location. But things seem to be okay tonight.

We went to our friends Mark and Yvette's annual Drunken Scrabble New Year's Party last night. I mostly had a good time, although I think Scrabble is one of those games which needs to be played with a time limit per turn - about 2 minutes would be right. People were taking 3-to-5 minutes per play (or more) last night, which just makes it not a fun game, to me, especially once I was clearly not going to win. I shoulda just resigned the game and left them to it.

Today we had a quiet day at home watching football and reading, and I cooked hamburgers and hash browns for dinner.

Tonight: Paying bills.

Exciting, huh?