Santa Ana Weekend

We have had a crazy weekend here in southern California. Yesterday, we had a beautiful day-great air, nice clear blue skies, and warm temperatures (around 80º). Last night, the Santa Ana winds kicked up, causing all hell to break loose. For those of you who aren’t familiar with how our air works here in Riverside, here is a quick 101. We are almost due east of LA and surrounding urbanity that causes massive air pollution. The wind usually comes from the sea, which is west of LA, blowing all that mess east, toward us in Riverside. That’s why I am always commenting on the air. Well, now that the Santa Anas have started, we are getting an east wind from the dessert, causing very warm temperatures (to be in the 90s) and all the smog to be blown back out to the sea-right? Guess again! Since the wind is so strong (gusts up to 60 and 70 mph), it’s kicked up just about everything that flies (doesn’t help that we’re in one of the worst droughts in 100 years) and is blowing all that out to the ocean. The particulate air count is currently at 475-that’s a scale out of 500. It usually is about 40 or 50. Right now, I can’t even sea the blue sky or the huge mountain that is 5 miles away. It’s that bad. Oh yearh, and we woke up to fires in Malibu, which they're having trouble containing because of the crazy winds! At least that smoke is blowing out to the ocean and not in my face! Anyway-enough of my ranting, here are some links to check out if you’re interested.

http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~fovell/ASother/mm5/SantaAna/winds.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_wind


As for the rest of the weekend…

On Saturday, I went to the salon and got some highlights freshened up in my hair and also had a tiny trim, as my last haircut was a nightmare. After lunch, we headed up to Redlands (about 25 minutes when the traffic is good on the freeway, which is never) to buy some shoes for Nick at DSW. For those of you who aren’t familiar, this is THE BEST place to buy shoes of any kind-great selection and great brands. While there, we visited BevMo-another of my favorite stores-and I stocked up on some wine, as they were having their 5¢ sale. Coincidently, none of the varietals we bought were that price, but oh well. We then capped off with an iced mocha raspberry frappucino from Starbucks and sat on the freeway to get home-definitely one of the top disadvantages of living in southern California. In the evening, we headed to Jose’s, a Mexican restaurant, for dinner and then returned home and watched “Thank you for Smoking.” A very nice satire if you like things like that.

Today, I’m staying close to home doing some cleaning (badly needed) and baking (pumpkin bars). I brought home some paperwork from work, which I probably will take a couple hours and do so I am caught up for the start of the week. We completed our grocery shopping this morning at WinCo (should be called GhettoCo, but hey-the prices are really cheap) and made our weekly Wal-Mart run. Our U-Verse (cable service) is out, so I imagine we’ll be dealing with that at some point. The week ahead looks uneventful and fairly calm-but we shall see. You never know with those Santa Anas!

Some photos from our porch-so maybe in the first one you can see a tiny bit of blue sky......but still this is pretty bad-even for Riverside! We're supposed to be used to this stuff!

A photo of Box Springs mountain from the parking lot. This moutain is not far away-like I said, maybe 5 miles. We can usually see it very clearly-unlike this photo.