Our Olde House: May 2026

Our A/C unit is still running fine with the circuit board workaround in place. We have no specific day, week or month yet when the new circuit board should arrive, but so far so good. We have had some pretty hot days in a row, and some ‘morning heat, afternoon A/C’ days which the unit has handled perfectly. Miss Sherry has been enjoying being able to open the new windows in the new kitchen to bring fresh air into the house for the cats, and us. The fresh air is nice, but sometimes the outside humidity is too high to leave the window open for very long. 

The gutter snoot has gotten a workout because the occasional rain has washed the remaining leaves and tassels into the gutters. This of course did not happen with just one storm, but has been dragged out over a few weeks since we have not seen a prolonged torrential downpour this year. I think all of the leaves and tassels have been washed into the gutters by now, and I have blown them out with the gutter snoot. The front and back gutters are running fine without running over so I should be good until Fall. 

I rode the big mower around the back yard last week. We have the lawn professionally mowed every other week, so I was careful to mow during their off week so they would not catch me mowing. I do not want the gardeners to think I am ungrateful or dissatisfied with their work, which is excellent and remarkably quick; I was really just testing to see if my new mower battery would still start the mower, which it did easily. And it’s fun for me to drive the mower around. 

There were some large and terrifying tornadoes south of us which caused all four of us great anxiety, remembering when our tree fell on this house. Even though it was three years ago, we are all very jumpy when the wind blows hard and the thunder roars. The cats take refuge under a bed or in a closet and Miss Sherry and I sit nervously on the couch trying to reassure the cats, and ourselves. 

I lived in California until I moved here in 2010. I do not like tornadoes because of the anxiety their prediction creates in me. I prefer earthquakes any day of the week because they occur without warning and are usually over before you realize what is happening. While there are several major earthquakes every few years, they are spread across the State, so your chance of being in one of the big ones is actually a ‘once in a lifetime’ occurrence. 

Since I lived near San Francisco almost all of my life, my lifetime earthquake was in 1989; the previous big earthquake near San Francisco was in 1906. There was a large earthquake in Southern California in 1971 but that is 400 miles south, about the same distance as from Clinton to Atlanta so it had no effect on us. The minimum Richter scale level for an earthquake that is felt in California is about 5.0 and only big earthquakes above 6.0 (ten times the power of 5.0) or 7.0 (one hundred times the power of 5.0) cause damage.   

I eventually made it home after eight hours in a small carpool of those of us who lived on the other side of the Bay Bridge which had collapsed in the earthquake. We went north across the Golden Gate bridge, and then east across the San Rafael bridge, neither of which were damaged. I was especially fortunate because it I had left work on time, I would have been in a public transit train under the San Francisco Bay when the earthquake hit. The tunnel under the Bay did not fail or leak, but the train did lose power and the passengers had to walk a few miles to get out of the tunnel. When I did get home there was damage even though I lived almost 50 miles from the epicenter. 

I stayed home from work for a couple of days since nothing worked after the earthquake; there was no power, no phones, no roads with bridges or tunnels that were safe and the natural gas was off, so no need for a Generac in California. The earthquake lasted about 15 seconds, during which time the land side of the earthquake fault moved about 14 feet north of the ocean side of the fault. This broke innumerable pipelines, gas lines and high voltage electrical lines instantly. No cell phones at the time, but since the towers would have been without power, they would not have worked either. 

Recovery was similar to a major hurricane because the damage is so widespread and there is so much of it. It took a lot of time to fix everything, but most damage was removed or mitigated in thirty days. We adapted to the remaining road system and cleaned up our own damage the best we could. I suppose the tornado damage to our house in Mississippi was the equivalent of a 5.5 earthquake in California; I really hope that this was my ‘once in a lifetime’ tornado.