Yesterday we drove down to Tacoma so Kurt could get his Hooters fix. Yes, my husband loves Hooters -- and no, it has nothing to do with the lack of clothing on the waitresses. He's one of those few guys that actually likes the food at Hooters. And since they've temporarily closed the Hooters just across the water, we had to go all the way to Tacoma.
Hopefully there is a closer one when we move to our next duty station.
When we left home yesterday morning, it was fairly foggy. Fog is pretty normal for fall mornings, but usually it burns off by noon or so. This time it didn't. By the time we drove across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the fog had thickened so much that we couldn't see the bridge tower until we were directly underneath it.
See what I mean?? And that was at half past noon, not early evening!
The cool part about crossing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge going into Tacoma is you can see the new bridge being built just to the right of the old bridge. They've installed some of the bridge deck, and some sections are simply hanging from their support wires! It looks quite eerie to see them just dangling in mid-air.
By the time we arrived at Hooters, just a few miles south on I-5, the sun had come out again. Throughout the day, we completely forgot about the fog and the dreariness because wherever we were, it was bright and sunny.
But then we headed west again, towards the Narrows, and found ourselves being plummeted into dark and dreary weather again. We weren't eased into it; all of a sudden, it was like a curtain had been dropped between us and the sun, and we went from needing sunglasses to having to turn on the headlights.
Weird.
Today was much the same, only minus the fog. When we woke up this morning, it was rather dreary and chilly, and I was glad we didn't have to go anywhere. The sun came out after a while, and Kurt decided to work on the spa, rebuilding the walls that had rotted over the years it spent at J's house. Then the clouds moved in again, and I was worried that it would rain and Kurt would have to stop what he was doing. It did start to rain, he said, and he had just made up his mind to quit after he made one last cut. But then the sun came out again, and he was able to get most of the job done.
We started getting that weird sunlight, the stuff you get after a particularly bad thunderstorm, where the sunlight is actually yellow in color, or sometimes greenish. The power sort of browned out a couple of times, not enough to turn off the computer, but enough to reset the cable box.
I decided to head down to our local used book store to pick up more books (I have a $50 credit there because I got rid of a butt-ton of books the last time I was there). But as I approached the strip mall, I realized it didn't have power. The used book store wasn't open anyhow because of illness, but it was weird to see all the streetlights out. I stopped by Albertson's to pick up some things for dinner, and even they didn't have power. It's quite odd to go shopping in a grocery store lit only by backup lights. Fortunately their registers are on a generator, so I was able to check out with no problems.
All this means that the little town just two miles from us got whammied with a storm that didn't even begin to touch our neighborhood. We have some leaves down, but that's it. The debris on the ground in town is pretty bad. I'm just flabbergasted, although quite thankful, that we didn't get hit with that storm. It usually takes a while to get power restored when it goes out... Last winter we were the only street in the neighborhood without power after the first day, and we had no power for a total of three days. Not fun.
It's weird how Mother Nature works sometimes.