Chanukah 5768

Happy Chanukah everyone!

We spent the first night at my parents' home in Portland after deciding to come into town from Seaside after over 48 hours without power and heat due to outages caused by the hurricane force winds that blasted the Pacific NW coast throughout the weekend and Monday night. The power has apparently come back on today in Seaside. We will be heading home Sunday. Suzanna was out of school all week due to the storm. Thankfully, we suffered no damage to our home. Those in Astoria and deeper in the floodplains faired far worse and out thoughts are with them and their families. I offered several times to volunteer at the Seaside Comm. Center to serve meals or whatever they needed, but they said they already had plenty of help. I did take an elderly neighbor who did not want to drive with all the downed trees and powerlines to an appointment at the Hospital. We saw several power poles that had been snapped off completely by the high sustained winds. The highest winds recorded for the storm that I have heard so far was 140 mph before the station anemometer broke. The station was just across the Columbia River from Astoria in the Washington Coast Range.