You may notice that a large number of the Northwest Bloggers listed on the right side of the screen are talking about the weather. It's not because we have nothing else to do. It's because the weather freaking sucks!
When I left Castle Drang for work at 3 AM this morning it was clear and 34 degrees F. A little of our previous precipitation was on the ground, but there was just the slightest trace of ice on the windshield of the Drangmobile, which scraped off with the merest effort.
Commute to work was a breeze, so to speak. Throughout the morning, though the temperature was steadily dropping, and stayed in the low to mid twenties for the rest of the day.
When I returned to the Proles' Parking Lot at the Salt Mines at 3:30 PM, this was the scene:
All that slop was the product of 12 hours of Global Warming. The Drangmobile is approximately in the middle of that photo; there were about 5 inches accumulated on the hood and roof. Took me 10 or 15 minutes to clean the snow off the vehicle; fortunately, there was very little ice.In an addendum to my previous posts re: Winter Safety, I was careful to clean it all off: headlights, grill, roof and hood. In Colorado I once witnessed a car getting rear-ended when a mass of snow flew off it's trunk lid, and onto the windshield of the car that was (admittedly) tail-gating it. The tail-gater couldn't see that the front car had stopped, you see...
Meanwhile, Mrs. Drang was at home being cat furniture.
Now, Mrs. Drang's normal commute is a total of maybe two and a half hours round trip, during which she gets some reading done on the Metro bus. Today she called her boss, who confirmed that things weren't bad around the office, so she continued into town. Two and a half hours later, after she finally transferred to the bus which drops her off a block from the office, he called her back and said "You might as well head on home, it's snowing and icing here and the hill's pretty bad..." So, after a total of about five hours of mass transit futility*, she was home. The bus she got on to head home was running an hour and a half late when she got on...
One thing about the Seattle-Tacoma Metropolitan area: In many, if not most, urban areas, the neighborhoods describe an area that is bounded by streets, by business type, by ethnic groups or economic classes, but there's generally a fair amount of geographic and/or topographic homogeneity.
Around here, the neighborhoods are dictated, if you will, by terrain features. Each one is it's own micro-climate. We have Highlands and Lowlands, Hills and Valleys and Ridges and Plateaus, not to mention a few very large lakes scattered about. ("Large" lakes if you didn't grow up around the Great ones, that is...)
My own first experience with a micro-climate was when I was out riding with a buddy on his motorcycle. We entered a small "dip" through which the Rouge* River ran, and the temperature was noticeably cooler. Magnify that by several square miles and ring all the variations on it you can think of. (Well, okay, there are no deserts in the Puget Sound area, and the nearest rain forest is over on the Olympic Peninsula, but you get what I mean. Highlands and Lowlands, Hills and Valleys and Ridges and Plateaus. and a few large lakes...)
It might be snowing here, sunny and dry there, and raining over there, all within a three mile radius of each other. I've pulled out of my driveway into pea soup fog, gone a quarter mile, and had it be clear and sunny. "Did you get rain/snow/wind/whatever?" is a very common topic of conversation here; it's not that we have nothing to talk about, it's that comparing notes about what the weather was in my neighborhood versus your neighborhood is, well, interesting.
Maybe because this area, Washington and Oregon, was originally settled by Midwestern farmers. (Although at the time they migrated out here, they were moving from The Old Northwest to the Oregon Country.) Maybe because our normal weather is so much of the same-o, same-o: "Ho, hum, drizzling*** again."
*Be afraid. Be very afraid. The Word is that The
**That's "Roozh" River, as in French for Red.
***You didn't believe what that stupid show's title song said about "bluest skies you've ever seen", did you?
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