Turtles and Wind

This morning, the main event was turtle watching. We have a pond that's about a third of an acre and over the last few days, my mom has been noticing very large turtles swimming and sitting around the edge. They are huge. She first worried that they were snappers, due to their size, but they really don't look like them, so that seems unlikely. They look a lot more like yellow bellied sliders. I'm not sure though. My mom decided to walk up down the driveway to get a better look. They must have gotten scared, because they all jumped in the water at once. Those guys can really move. Then they were all swimming with their surprisingly large blue heads sticking out of the water. I'll have to ask my friend, ES, if she has some idea what kind they might be.

I spent most of the afternoon, evening and night working. I really didn't feel like working.

Around 7:30pm, my parents heard over one of the emergency services radio frequencies an announcement that there was a high wind warning. Shortly after that I got e-mail that the national weather service had issued a warning for winds of 40-50 mph until 10:30pm! That's pretty brisk. Sure enough, a few minutes later, there was a sudden steady roar of high winds. I always get worried that a branch is going to fly through one of the two windows in my room. It's going to be great once I move into a house with even more glass. I'll be hiding in the guest bathroom all the time. The lights dimmed several times, so I think we were lucky that we didn't lose power. There were apparently lots of brush fires breaking out in Orange County through all of this and there were a few trees down. Of course, we won't know how much tree damage there was on our property until tomorrow. Everything seems fairly calm now, so I should be able to get some sleep with no problems.