Well, it looks like I get to spend Christmas in Seattle this year rather than flying home to see the folks. I can’t get out of my neighborhood to get to the airport this morning.
Luckily, I’ve at least been invited to a couple of Christmas parties tonight and tomorrow; I just hope the roads clear up enough so I can get out of the neighborhood later on.
At the moment, it appears to be a “wintery mix” down by the Fort Lewis area. It was more rain than snow as I walked in from the parking lot at around 7:00 am this morning.
As I don’t have a window, I can’t tell you what it’s doing right at the moment, but the WSDOT cameras around this area don’t show any snow coming down. Highways are pretty much bare and wet, with bits of slush here and there.
I managed to drive down into my office in Redmond yesterday… to find only a few people there. I hung around for a few hours but didn’t really have anything to do, so I headed back home after running a few errands.
And it’s snowing again this morning. We’ve got at least two inches, and it’s coming down hard and steady. I wanted a white Christmas, but at this rate, it’s just going to be white with no Christmas involved; we won’t be able to visit our friends like we’d planned.
Crikey! I just looked out at the Jeep. I said it was snowing heavily, but since I parked in a different position I couldn’t see the Jeep when I looked out the front door. I looked through my bedroom window, and there’s about eight inches of snow on it!
Penguindamn it! The news in my mom’s town is trying to be all alarmist. The same headline shit like “'Tis the season for more home burglaries!” but today they are making it sound like pre-Armageddon weather. They are issuing reports saying the police are asking that people not travel etc.
There are NO official watches warnings for her region or ours. It’s raining and well above zero. My mother has a weather phobia. And as bad luck would have it, some news station basically got some crummy quote from some beat cop who was whining about how much easier it would be for the plows and salt/sand trucks if there were fewer cars on the roads. Happy to have some kind of “dire news” to report, they keep playing the clip on TV like it’s some kind of “stay home! don’t drive!” weather advisory. It’s not. The weather is safe for travel.
But as a result, my mom has kept postponing her travel plans and has totally derailed all family plans for my family and my sister’s. She thinks any snow falling from the sky puts everyone in mortal peril. “Don’t go out! It’s taking your life into your own hands!!!”
How someone who grew up in Quebec has never have learned how to drive in snow, and thinks a mild dusting with powder is catastrophic, I’ll never understand.
So it turns out that it’s Seattle DOT policy not to salt the roads. They’re concerned that using salt once or twice a year will negatively impact the environment. :rolleyes:
So their official plan is to plow the roads inadequately, let the remaining snow get packed down, then spread an inadequate amount of sand on it, then tell people to stay off the streets because driving conditions are unsafe.
No, they put some other chemical de-icer in with the salt. They claim it’s equally effective.
I got out yesterday and got the last 2 pairs of chains in my size that the place had. Whew! We’ll make a run to Fred Meyer today, to try to scrounge up some Christmas presents – I was planning on doing a good deal of shopping this week, but… It’s times like these that I’m especially glad we don’t live farther into Magnolia than we do.
Then we’ll attempt to get up to my in-laws’ on Queen Anne tonight, for dinner, and then up to Capitol Hill for church.
I can’t believe it’s snowing again. Crazy!
We’re going to try to be on the road to Sequim around noon. We have another 2" and hubby forgot to plug the block heater in last night. If we get to the folks’ by tomorrow, we’ll be lucky. :rolleyes:
ODOT says:
Yesterday our iron/canvas gazebo partially collapsed under the weight of the snow and I had to spend several hours scooping the shit out of the bowl created thereby lest it completely wreck everything that’s under it. Dammit. Oh yeah, and it snowed again last night with more expected today. I’m really and truly sick of this nonsense!
CRAP!!!
It seems that someone decided that they need the driver’s side wiper arm on my Jeep more than I do. I’m not talking about the blade. I’m talking about the whole arm, which was there when I parked the Jeep yesterday. This is not something that easily falls off. You have to remove a clip and then lift it off, and even then it’s a tight fit.
Hey, it’s not as if I actually HAVE to drive 500 miles through inclement weather or else not spend Christmas with my very good friend, but rather sit in my house watching movies.
I swapped the passenger side arm over. No dealer in the state has any in stock. The nearest place that has one is a wrecking yard some 80 miles away.
I hope whoever stole my wiper arm winds up in a ditch, and all his mother can do is bark for help.
Fuck, Johnny, that SUCKS! I’m with you, you just don’t fuck with another man’s car, dammit! I’m having similar troubles with side mirrors–one car lost the driver’s side to a garbage truck and it’s now up in Vancouver getting it fixed (where it’s been for the past week or so but it might as well be on the fucking MOON for all the good it does me since I can’t go GET IT) and the other got the passenger mirror (big truck sports mirror, too) smacked by a tree limb at 40 mph (yanked it right the hell off and crumpled the housing) right before this snow shit started and I can’t even get out to the U-Pullit to get a replacement…
Cabin fever? Huh, what’s that? :rolleyes:
I can haz summr naow plz?
My husband is on a ladder with the shovel, trying to get snow off the carport.
It started to buckle and sag inward.
I need some more wine.
At least he’s not figuring out creative ways to melt it with a propane tank, a length of hose, and a shoulder strap.
I don’t know anybody who would do that. No sir. Because that would be silly. Besides, I told him it’d freeze back up, but would he listen?
Oh, dear.
No, he’s far more sensible than that. And more sensible than I. I, still imbibing wine, went outside to observe, assist, but mostly encourage, arrived in time to see him put the shovel through the carport roof. (It’s framing with rolly plastic. You know what I mean, but I haven’t the vocabulary for it.) So I was taking a little video of husband on the ladder in the snow when the shovel went through and in attempting to capture it, went down on my ass with the camera in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
At least I landed in a big pile of the snow that was previously on the carport. I didn’t get the camera wet and I didn’t even put out my cigarette.
I may have peed my pants laughing while I was down there, but that’s just rumour.
And Good Old Mother Effing Nature delivered. The first quarter inch wasn’t so bad, so I went out to start my car. (It’s a bit temperamental about starting in cold weather, so I try to run it every day.) Since I didn’t need to go anywhere, and couldn’t have even if I did, I let it idle in the driveway for an hour to warm up and completely charge the battery. When I went out to turn it off, I couldn’t even get to it.
The driveway slopes, and the temperature had been rising to about 30, so I had to contend with ice covered with liquid water. :mad: :mad: Thank god for the 1 1/2 cups of traction salt I found. I managed to cross the eight feet of Slippery Death from Hell and shut it off.
Today’s partial thaw was nowhere near sufficient to rid me of this frigid plague. The refrozen streets are still icy madness except for the ones that are state routes.
Any Florida Dopers want to adopt me?
You simply **have **to post that somewhere.
Umm, so male Dopers like myself can learn from his experience. 
I fall down at 1:21 in, almost at the very end. Cold, tired husband, with shovel in roof is not amused.
The streets here are still in bad enough shape that half of the bus routes in the city are suspended, including the only route serving my neighborhood. Thanks, SDOT!
I got close to two feet of snow overnight Wednesday and half the day yesterday.
At least the digging was good exercise. It was the biggest single dump of snow we’ve had here in a few years, I’m told. And we needed it. But oy.