A 'Storm Watch' to believe

Whenever it rains here, the newscasters scramble to bring the first coverage of 'Storm Watch whenever". It's always very dramatic and not always necessary. It seems that so much of the weather systems blow right over us. But for the last few days it's been very wet here in sunny southern California. I personally love it and would take it for a lot longer than it's predicted to stick around. It's usually the same here every. single. day. Boring. My whole life I have loved the rain...it's like it wakes me up or something. Very energizing.

Yesterday though, my son and I thought it would be fun to spend the day at our favorite library in Huntington Beach. Central Park Library. It's a great big older library with lots of huge floor to ceiling windows. There are tons of tall trees outside and lots of water features inside and out. A very cool place to spend a wet day in our opinion. So we get there with no problem and nothing to speak of as far as the amount of rain falling. Pretty standard 'storm'. We decided to take a quick drive down to the beach (it's only a 2 minute drive, if that) and saw that the waves were pretty big and that the ocean was as grey as the sky. After a few minutes we noticed that the wind was really whipping the trees around and so we decided to head back to the library. We park and the rain starts coming a bit harder, nothing major, and so we get out of the car. Big mistake. Within literally one minute we are soaked as if we just jumped into a pool! Head to toe. Down to our underwear. Even with an umbrella (that broke instantly-the wind was worse than I had thought). So there we are running in what felt like 20 directions to either get inside or get back to the car. We were so disoriented and were laughing so hard, to keep from crying, I think, it seemed like forever to get to 'safety'. We couldn't even hold our heads up enough or keep our eyes open to see the car. It was as if someone had a hose pointed directly at our faces. (If you've ever been to Niagra Falls on the Maid in the Mist boat, it was like that). We got out of there as soon as we could; we were freezing and dripping wet! As soon as we hit the freeway, it mostly stopped. It was bizarre.

At home, hubby was at the TV with the news channel on and was watching an emergency broadcast with actual information about what was going on. Neither of us had ever seen one in our lives that wasn't "only a test....repeat, only a test." Apparently there were tornado watches in Huntington Beach. !!! We hadn't been there in months (we moved away two years ago) and of all days we go, a flippin' TORNADO WATCH! Insane. At home it was pretty calm, minus a fallen 25+ foot tree that blew over at the park across the street from our house.

A very wild day in our book.