The view from my window

These last few days have seen some severe weather here in California. The 80 freeway to Tahoe has been closed for much of the time since we got back from Northstar - I'm glad we came back on Wednesday and didn't try to stay later for the snow!

Yesterday we had a respite after the fierce storm of Friday. We used the time to clear all the dropped branches from the yard and out of the pool.

In the late morning the rain started again, we had thunder and lightning to the delight of the boys, and also...

...hail! The boys had not seen it before and we really interested that it was like little ice cubes.

I'm reading Jeremy Clarkson's And another thing * in which he highlights the ability of the British to talk about the weather. He claims no other country can rival this level of interest in weather. I need to strongly disagree (with this and many other of Jeremy's positions...which is of course the point of reading the book!). Anyway - my point is that Jeremy has clearly never spent much time in California and experienced the media frenzy that weather can generate here. It's especially remarkable in that California weather is nothing if not predictable - this storm was forecast all through the previous week.

* Worryingly my father also recieved this book for Christmas...