Health, Friends, Flooding

 

So I left you on Wednesday telling you that we came home Tuesday from our trip due my possible flu infection, but by Wednesday I felt it most likely was a “slight dehydration and Nutritional Ketosis“.  Well, I am sure my diagnosis of dehydration was it…by Thursday I was pretty much back to myself.  By Friday I felt good enough to hold our prior appointment in Orlando with a lady named Gladys, she also goes by “Dee”, so we left our condo at 7:30 am, got the motorhome (easier for Marcia to travel in motorhome and easier to leave Skruffy in the motorhome than in a car) and headed over to Orlando.  By 11:15 we were pulled in near a Longhorn Steakhouse close to where Dee was staying, unhooked the car, told Skruffy that we would be back in a few hours, and went and got Dee.  By 11:40 we were sitting down at the Longhorn, and at 2:45 we were taking her back to where she was staying (she was only minutes away from the restaurant.)  Wanting to miss as much of the traffic as possible, I quickly hooked the car up, and we drove back home.  I let Marcia and Skruffy off at the Condo, and I went to RV Storage.  I unhooked the car, put it in park during the process, and could not get the key out.  Oh no, I did it again…forgot to hit the kill switch to kill the power, and ran the HHR battery down as we pulled it behind the motorhome.  That is what you get when you are in a hurry…you make mistakes.  I turned the motorhome around and used it to jump the HHR, which started right up.  Parked the motorhome, now in the dark…no easy feat, and drove the HHR home, with jumper cables in the back seat, and backed into our parking place just in case.  Good news, the car has started right up each time now since, so no harm done.

Marcia has a number of good friends…many at our church, many whom she has gotten to know over the years.  I have met a good number of them.  Although Marcia and Dee had not seen each other for at least 30 years, they still had that “Good Friends” feeling…much like I have seen with other friends she had not seen for a long time and then got back together with again.  I hated to let them know that we needed to call and end to the lunch…but the good thing is that we now know that Dee stays with good friends for up to a month during many winters in Orlando, so we are bound to see her again.  We also might see her when we are up in the Chicago area this spring, which is where she lives.

Above is a live snap shot of the Oroville Dam spillway, 6 pm eastern time Sunday.  The main spillway has a huge gap in it, causing much of the water to go way off to the right in the picture, instead of running down the main spill way.  This has caused massive erosion which was not part of the master plan when it was built back in the 60’s.  Also, the emergency spillway, just to the left of the main spillway but not in the picture, was activated for the first time about a week ago…and the erosion was tremendous.   The dam started to be built in 1961, and it was completed in 1968.  Right across the street from where we lived during this time period was a family whose father worked for the government, and was heavily involved with the dam construction.  I think he was with the COE, but it might have been another federal or even state agency.  He would fly up to Oroville a few times a week, otherwise worked out of an office in Sacramento.  The dam has always been deemed safe…but it is an earthen dam, and the spillways are always the weak part of an earthen dam.

Due to the heavy release and the heavy rains, rivers and streams in the upper Sacramento Valley are flooding, and yesterday I-5 had flooding across the roadway.  Above is a picture taken off a YouTube of a truck which went through the flood…that is a CHP car directly in front along the left of the roadway.  “IF” that dam breaks, it is going to be very disastrous for much of the area between Sacramento and Chico, and very disastrous for the town of Oroville.  However, unless something else gives, my family in Citrus Heights and Roseville and North Sacramento should not have any flooding because they are at a high enough elevation…with my brother in North Sac being at the lowest elevation.  Also, the Sacramento River is designed to flood to the west of Sacramento, and not to the east side of the levee…but like I said, “if” nothing else goes wrong.  Of course, we are hoping that nothing gets worse with Oroville, and that they have everything fixed up this summer when the lake’s elevation drops and things dry out.  Oroville is the largest earthen dam in the United States.

Above is Lake Oroville just 30 months ago.  We saw it this low for a couple of summers, but last summer it had gained half of its water.  Now it is filled all the way up, as shown below (same bridge, just a little different angle.)  One has to wonder if it is time to pray for drought???