Yeah, Maggie, Columbus Day seems to be some sort of target date around here. Maybe it's all that Scandinavian energy in this area, ticked off that Columbus gets the credit and Leif Erikson doesn't have his own holiday.
I'm visualizing the local. Whenever I was there, it was usually during pretty nice weather (generally the August Song Circle, barbeque and potluck), but that must have been pretty hairy!
One storm I really remember happened on Thanksgiving Day maybe twenty or so years ago. Barbara's mother was out from Kansas and she wanted to take in the Thanksgiving morning church service at St. Mark's Cathedral on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from where we live. It started out to be a fairly nice day, but suddenly the wind came up while the service was going on. It sounded like the roof of the cathedral was going to blow off. I frequently glanced apprehensively at the big stained glass windows as they actually flexed with the wind gusts. If any of them had let go, there probably would have been shards of glass blowing through the church (I kinda had that "atheist in a fox hole" feeling!). Of course, being on the edge of a hill overlooking Lake Union, St Mark's has weather a fair number of storms like that.
In the afternoon after the service, we were due to go to the south end (White Center), where Barbara's cousin was doing the usual turkey and fixin's. By the time we started out, the wind was still blowing pretty good, but the wilder gusts had abated. We heard on the car radio that there were power outages everywhere and lots of people were stuck with tepid turkeys in their suddenly non-functional ovens. Lots of warnings about salmonella and such. Fortunately Bob's (Barbara's cousin) power was still on, so all went well there. It took several days for the utility companies to get everybody's power back on.