Weather

Another storm is expected to arrive today and linger through the weekend with wet weather, gusty winds and large swells in the Pacific. Whenever a weather system is predicted to hit over a weekend, I get many people asking me what the weather will be like Saturday and Sunday. Maybe they are going boating or to a picnic, but I find that most people are just curious about the weather. I have found that the trick to giving a weather report is do not go into technical details or be indecisive in your predictions.

The forecast for Saturday calls for only a 20% chance of rain, and Sunday is supposed to be mostly sunny, according to the National Weather Service. But next week is expected to be a smaller scale repeat of this week, with showers rolling in again, although with not as much strength. Over the past few days, strong surf and equally powerful swells combined to erode part of the Balboa Peninsula, prompting lifeguards to move dozens of lifeguard towers back by 20 feet, said Jon Mitchell, a lifeguard captain.

Despite what was billed as potentially the worst storm yet, Newport-Mesa was mostly unscathed Wednesday by the rain and wind that had caused so many problems the previous two days. California Highway Patrol officials said there were still more crashes — mostly minor spin-outs — on county freeways than normal, but there were few major accidents and none in Costa Mesa or Newport Beach. Police and fire officials in both cities said Wednesday was uneventful compared with earlier in the week.

I am most certainly my father’s daughter. I share his sense of humor and his cooking skills, not to mention he gave me a set of gorgeously long eyelashes. So it’s no surprise that I pulled a Mary Ann while going to Best Buy to return the first season of “The Big Bang Theory” on Wednesday. What’s a Mary Ann? Well, Dad was listening to his favorite radio deejay on his way to work. It had rained a lot the night before, and the deejay was warning people that the rain had frozen, so it was best to be Ginger, and maybe even go so far as to be Mary Ann. Dad chuckled at this nice little joke as he got out of his truck and promptly landed on his backside.

A few manhole covers floated away. At least a dozen motorists got stranded in high waters on the south side of Costa Mesa and had to be towed out. And a tree fell on top of a house in Corona del Mar — all courtesy of Monday’s rainstorm, which is expected to worsen throughout the week, officials said. The series of Pacific Coast storms, forecast to last until Friday, is expected to dump as many as 8 inches of rain along Orange County’s coastal areas, creating treacherous conditions for small boats, unruly waves for surfers and turning a simple walk along the beach into an “at-your-own-risk” adventure.