The Big Clear Up

Nature has bitten back with a vengeance. More than two weeks on from the big storm and Pasadena’s clear up effort continues.  More than 75,000 homes were without power for five days.  Ten days later there were still houses waiting to be re-connected and complaints about inefficient utility companies and lack lustre responses abound.

Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium has been designated as the tree recycling depot – there will certainly be no shortage of logs for those winter fires and the Southern Californian mulch mountain is growing daily. Re-cycling is not a particularly popular past-time in the US and there is a noticeable absence of homeowners loading up their own cars with tree debris – they prefer instead to sweep it out into the road where it remains in large mounds presumably awaiting collection by the city council or the posse of Mexican gardeners.

This doesn’t altogether surprise me – here in affluent Pasadena very few homeowners will ever cut their own grass, wash their own car or clean their own loo.  Hardly surprising then that there is a distinct lack of residents gathering up their own leaves.

It also appears to be perfectly acceptable here to leave your rubbish out on the street  and rely  on someone else to cart it way. I regularly see abandoned three piece suites, the odd chest of drawers or a box of old books or children’s toys out on the sidewalk – we’d call that fly tipping in the UK and would receive a hefty fine. Here you just dump your stuff and hope that someone else will walk off with it. Rather surprisingly it’s a system that does actually work – as long as you don’t mind your neighbourhood looking like a junk yard for a few days.

Driving has become even more of a hazard than usual. Palm tree fronds and fallen branches still litter many roads and new chicanes appear daily around the accumulating garden waste burial mounds.  Traffic signals and street lamps are still down.  Major road junctions are functioning as chaotic twelve way stops and many drivers appear to have lost that rather elusive American common sense gene altogether.  Rather than co-operating in an orderly fashion most of these junctions are complete free-for-alls with accidents occurring on a daily basis.  So even if you were lucky enough to avoid being hit by a falling tree, there is a every chance now you will be hit by another car.

All this chaos is just the result of one night of heavy wind.  I don’t know if it was simply a question of being taken unawares, a lack of co-ordination, or even  lack of co-operation but the clear up is not going well. Heaven help California when there really is a big disaster – like an earthquake.  Ever since we arrived here and experienced our first minor earth tremor public service adverts have regularly appeared on TV reminding us to be prepared for the BIG ONE and to make sure we have our emergency disaster kit to hand - bottled water, dried food, batteries, torch, urgent medical supplies. Maybe a rake, wheelbarrow and large dose of community spirit would be good things to have on standby too.

A Blustery Day

We don’t get a lot of weather here in Southern California.  It’s basically dry, calm and sunny 90% of the year.

 This does make meteorology a rather unremarkable and fairly predictable career,  so naturally the local weather guys have learned to play up their roles a little bit.  When there is a slight variation to the norm it becomes a major event; a slight breeze and  a wind advisory is issued; coastal fog mixes with city smog to become the “marine layer” and a rare day of rain is a major storm.  

This week however, we had  genuine excitement in Pasadena because we actually had some real weather.  Santa Ana winds are a Southern Californian phenomenon that occur every Fall – usually hot dry winds famous for fanning the flames of those forest fires that regularly threaten celebrity homes up in the Hollywood Hills.

A wind advisory is usually issued for anything over five miles an hour which is hardly likely to  ruffle that immaculate Californian hair, so when this particular Santa Ana wind advisory was issued, nobody took much notice.  Batten down the hatches, said  Barbie the TV weather girl; tie your patio furniture down announced her team mate Ken.  Oh yeh?

Come about nine o-clock in the evening I noticed it had got a bit noisy outside; the palm trees were flapping recklessly about as the first of several sun loungers took off across the pool. Gusts of wind continued to rock the building all night. At seven o’clock the next morning Pasadena looked decidedly worse for wear. Local news reports told of blocked roads, broken power lines and numerous cars and houses all damaged by a positive plethora of falling trees.  Gusts of up to 90 miles an hour had been recorded in the night and a State of Emergency had been declared.  To the teenager’s delight  all schools were closed.

Fortunately there were no stories of human injuries or fatalities – remarkable really considering the number of trees that had actually come down.

So why so much destruction from a few gusts of high wind? Apparently a lot of it was to do with shallow root systems.  Rather unsurprisingly a lot of the trees growing up through Pasadena’s concrete sidewalks, and artistically planted on those nicely manicured suburban front lawns are not native to California.  The natural landscape in the foothills area is “chapparal”, Mediterranean style heathland dotted with low growing drought tolerant evergreens. 

As a non-native species myself I fully sympathise with these imported trees who find it so hard to put down roots in the inhospitable Southern Californian environment.  Planted to make the place look pretty and forced to survive on a supply of water derived almost entirely from domestic garden sprinklers, even in winter these deciduous trees have retained a fair amount of leaves  making them decidedly top heavy.  A stronger than normal puff of wind and over they go, taking half the sidewalk with them.

So whilst the city of Pasadena sweeps up; the insurance assessors and lawyers get to work, and the Mexican gardeners rub their hands together with glee, what  lessons can be learned from this catastrophe?

There’s no point re-filling those gaping holes in the street and on those manicured front lawns with yet another ornamental cherry tree.  It might sound too obvious, but my advice would be go native and plant a tumbleweed.

There's No Place Like Home

I've just taken a couple of weeks out of my busy LA schedule to travel back to England - so nice of everybody to get the flags out for me!!

Of course it's just pure coincidence that we are back for our hols at the same time as the Royal Wedding - despite being able to string a few American acquaintances along for a couple of weeks we really didn't come back just to witness the nupitals of Wills and Kate. It's all to do with that quaint old thing called school holidays - my daughter doesn't get very many in the US so we decided to take advantage of the fact that she's now off for 10 days and come back down to earth for a reality check.

There is a great atmosphere in the UK at the moment, personally I think this is more to do with the glorious weather than that wedding although most people do seem pretty happy about that too - and the extra day off work of course. I have tried to explain this purely British phenomenon about the weather to my new American friends but its not really something those lucky Californians with their constant sunshine will ever understand. The British really do make hay when the sun shines - we get out there and make the most of it, after all you never know how long it will last.  The village where we have our UK home was positively buzzing; the pubs were packed; beer gardens and parks overflowing and yes there were actually kids swimming in the river.   Everyone just heads outdoors, takes the day off, strips off, packs a picnic or lights the BBQ. To have nearly three weeks of unbroken warm sunshine is almost unheard of in April, even rarer to have it over a bank holiday weekend as well.

Americans don't get that either - this bank holiday thing - my husband's colleagues can't believe how many days off work we Europeans get given each year. Fortunately my husband went out to the US on his home country leave entitlement - most US employees have a miserly 10 days annual leave per year and if they are lucky perhaps another five added on as paid time off - which they have to use if they are sick. After that any additional days are unpaid.

Most UK workers will have four fully paid days off out of the last working 10, without taking any leave at all. Canny folks who have planned carefully will have taken 7 days leave to have a continuous period of 17 days off work. Not bad eh?

So how is England? Is it much changed? Well my local Tesco was absolutely packed and food was flying off the shelves like there was no tomorrow - despite all this talk of a recession. Fresh fruit and veg was still a lot cheaper and looked a lot fresher than anything I can buy at my local US Ralphs, despite the further distance it has to travel and the increasing cost of fuel. Talking of which the price of petrol is twice the price it is in LA, and yes everyone does moan about it but most people are happy to drive around in smaller cars, will use public transport and can and do walk. All this fuss about rising gas prices back in the US and not once during the petrol saving tips they keep dishing out on TV has anyone suggested leaving the SUV at home and using your legs instead. But there you go - a  few more price hikes and they might get there eventually. (In case you are wondering the top tip is usually drive 50 miles out of your way to save 5 cents a gallon.)

How are the people? Well the sun is shining so everyone is extremely cheerful and very friendly. Hardly a grim miserable face to be seen. Of course not everyone rushed to greet me effusively, and no shop assistant instantly started acting like my new BFF, but that was okay. I could cope with that - I'm a grown up. I knew it wasn't because they didn't like me, it's just that old fashioned British reserve. I wasn't offended - I positively enjoyed the opportunity to browse in peace.

It's good to meet up with several old friends and yes, visit lots of very pleasant hostelries and have a good old gossip over an alcoholic beverage or two. It feels good to stay in the pub until after 10.00 pm, not need a calculator to work out the correct amount of gratuities, or be under the impression that the staff can't wait for us to leave.

It's good to catch all the old favourites on TV - Come Dine With Me, Masterchef and my day time treat -Homes Under the Hammer! It's a relief to watch programmes that credit the audience with an ounce of intelligence and aren't interupted every ten minutes by a lengthy commerical break (even the commericals seem positively intellectual). TV news is always more credible when it isn't presented by a Barbie doll or sponsored by Ducolax, and it really is quite enlightening to find out what is happening out there in the rest of the world.

My daughter can just take herself off every morning and meet up with her old school friends - there's no having to taxi her here there and everywhere. Just normal kids taking a walk or catching the local train or bus to meet up - rediscovering the freedom and independence that she just doesn't have in the States.

So, all in all, it feels very good to be back home and have my feet well and truly back on the ground. Happy smiley faces all round - until it starts to rain of course! That'll be Friday then.