Day Four Hundred and Fifty-Nine

The Debris of 12.12.12

It's history. Just look at it! 12:12 on 12.12.12

And unless I'm alive in 89 more years, I'll never again see a repeat date like this. So yes, I took a photo of my phone screen to commit the day to memory.

Ok, I took TWO photos of my phone. This is the calendar I keep on my cell...it's been quite the busy month (the dots represent appointments we've made) and though yesterday we weren't busy one bit, I still set a reminder to alarm me of the upcoming date and time! So neat!

 Onto the real stuff. Just twelve hours before this photo was taken, 10 inches of rain consumed this entire street outside our apartment. The water crept up all the way to the brick sidewalk...and then some. We woke up yesterday morning to this image. In place of the flash river, debris and $15,000 worth of bark scattered the pavement all around us. For the remainder of the day, blowers and rakes became the background sound to our life. Stories of ruined cars dominated the conversations we held, and altogether, it was just a gloomy, noisy sort of afternoon.

 On the way to Crossfit - on the same road we take to church - a small lake pooled in the entrance to The Scripps Research Institute...(note that each side of the median is a one-way). I watched as several cars drove in, realized the flood, and reversed their cars (on the one-way) into oncoming traffic. It was a mess. And maybe that man was trying to clean it up?

Still hours after the flood, many streets remained covered in water. This is just outside a middle school...hopefully they re-worked the crosswalks so the students weren't soaking wet upon their arrival! 

I was told that the Crossfit class at 7:00 that night couldn't drive home until 10:30...Neither the building nor the parking lot were flooded, but at the bottom of the driveway exiting the lot, a 5-foot swell of water blocked their only way home. I made a comment that in the year we've been here, we've never seen anything like this. One lady replied, "I've been here 20 years and have never seen anything like this either!"