…thanks for hanging in while we resolved our technical difficulties, not the least of which included no power for three long days!

I actually did have stuff to post for Crafty Tuesday today, despite not being able to use my sewing machine for the better part of the week, but the no power thing really took the wind out of my sails. It has taken me all week so far just to get fridges and freezers (argh!) cleaned out and restocked, the mountain of laundry back to a manageable size, normal activities resumed, and not to mention some sort of catch-up on sleep.

For those of you who may not have heard, we got hit very, very hard by our not-so-friendly Santa Ana winds last Wednesday night. I spent the entire night on the sofa watching our avocado tree being whipped around by 95mph winds and willing it to not snap off and come through our french doors or picture window.

I actually heard our neighbor’s tree fall down – here is what it looked like in the wee hours of Thursday…

And it wasn’t the only tree down making our street impassable.

Our street looked pretty ravaged, and it still wasn’t nearly the worst of it. Pasadena and Altadena up into the mountains are just unbelievable. If your yard didn’t have a big tree down in it, then it pretty much just looked like this…

Because of our climate and the fact that we get very little water, apparently the root structures on our trees are VERY shallow, so it was not uncommon to see this every few hundred feet…

Keep in mind this is pretty much just our block, which like I said, was nothing compared to other parts of town. Although when the kids found out that it was a snow day (as in there’S-NO school!) they hung around our street to watch the action…

We were incredibly lucky. All our trees survived – although our avocado tree got pretty beat up, I think he’ll survive. AND, oddly enough…all of our ornaments on the tree except for two stayed on!

Yes, we are all in our pjs still. They were warm at least, and we had no heat – remember. The Santa Ana winds also brought ch-ch-chilly weather. This morning when Daddy and Em came back from their run the temp was a balmy 37 degrees. Yipes. I think we struggled to get to 60 today. Thankfully our heat came back on Saturday night, but there are still people without power even tonight.

Like I said, we are very lucky and blessed that everyone is safe and our house survived. It could have been so much worse.