Yeah, I took zero to work this morning and it was pretty bad. When I got on the freeway, the wind was so powerful I had to slow way down and decided to just drive through town. When I drove through town, there were parts of trees and garbage cans in the road, and a bunch of the stop lights were not working. The power seems to be off in half the town and I expect the power in my apartment to go out soon.

What's really bothering me is the fact that I'm supposed to be getting dental surgery today. I don't want the power to go out in the middle of that.

What time? The storm will start clearing out of the Bay Area by noon and the rain 'round here is starting to ease up slightly.

That's good to know, I commute from Oakland to Walnut Creek and the drive in this morning was pretty bad. I'm hoping it lessens up before I drive some since it'll be dark then. Fortunately, this morning everybody was driving slower instead of asshat fast like usual.

I was walking to work from BART and there was a stretch on New Montgomery which is a wind tunnel on NORMAL days. Today, I had a really hard time crossing the alley, walking into the wind. The bones littered around the mouth of said alley were a testament to those who tried and failed. I watched a hat sail two blocks in the gale force winds. I watched a small child sail three blocks.

Stay safe, guys.

This has been a crazy winter for the West Coast, with this storm and the monster storm that beat the f*ck out of the Washington and Oregon coasts last month. I still haven't gotten used to seeing the FEMA flyers all over the place.

I'm not in Monterey right now, but my wife says there are trees down all over the place.

Well, good thing I wasn't going anywhere today because there's no way in hell I can get my Mustang out of our flooded cul de sac. I think it has something to do with the storm drain; I fished a cardboard box out of it (and half took a swim in the process) and that seemed to start a current, but the waters haven't receded yet. Maybe it's too much water for the drain to handle.

From what I'm hearing, it's a standard bad storm by plain state standards, except in the mountains. Still stay safe, folks.

My neighbor's pick-up truck is looking like Noah's Ark at the moment.

Might there be yard debris down there? Do leaves fall off trees in California at all?

Rat Boy, you want to be *real* careful around flooded storm drains. You can break bones or drown in those things, or even be sucked in and partially crushed in the process, when there's a lot of water around and something suddenly clears. Just a thought from the East. Kids die that way out here periodically during bad storms.

Think of it this way - a four-inch flow of water will carry a car or light truck off of a road. It'll pick you off your feet under the right circumstances...

Earthquakes are generally good for little other than shaking the bed and scaring gullible East Coast-ers.

Yep the weather is crazy. There's no electricity at my house, driving is dangerous (with the eventual downed trees and non-working lights), and I'm typing this from work in Daly City, which also had an outage but it was restored.

Affected residential areas in SF apparently have to wait until 5pm until they even know when is their turn for getting electricity back.

I learned my lesson the hard way, and in between shivers, I managed to take these:

Fortunately, Public Works showed up and cleared it all out. Their guess is that the box started it and it just needed more time to drain away.