Down at my sister's house near Fort Lewis. We had a large family gathering last night, with the kids screaming and running around because we're out in the country and who is gonna hear? Today my sister and I drove to Tacoma to see a museum containing nifty glass artwork, but it was closed, so we discussed family business, stopped at a used book store with a cat curled up on the counter, then out for pizza. During last week's storm in Portland, cars were following snow plows on the freeway, driving at low speeds. Many ran out of gas as the off-ramps were unplowed and impassable. I passed several such vehicles last Wednesday, sealed in snow by subsequent plowings. Even if cars had managed to exit, fuel trucks couldn't reach many filling stations along the interstate.
The Washington sky is in constant flux, as if under contract to display as many looks as possible: overcast, sunshine with light shafts so brilliant they make you squint, back to partially cloudy, dark and broiling, but always with rain, or rain mixed with snow.
Tomorrow, MDW and I begin our thousand-mile drive back to Los Angeles. Lots of rain in the outlook, but hopefully very little snow. This has been a wonderful trip seeing family and the best, most adventurous, Christmas I've had in awhile.
4 comments:
My future sister-in-law in Seattle has been complaining that she has to dig her car out of the snow every day, because the snow plows keep burying it! I guess parking somewhere other than the street is not an option.
A customer's blog post from a few days ago, which I just read, mentioned that soon after he arrived in Dubai, it began raining. The way he described the unpreparedness of people and the driving mishaps, it seems that rain in Dubai is like snow for us on the U.S. west coast. It's so rare that nobody quite knows how to handle it.
My sister said there were 276 accidents the first night of snow.
Plus no salt on the roads leaves plenty for drivers to slip on.
BTW, congratulations.
When is the wedding?
[Yeah when is the wedding, seems like you've been engaged forever!]
Remind me never to complain about the weather here in Texas. I can't imagine all that. I lived in Germany for a few years but they were having unusually warm[er] winters at the time. Unfortunatly for them, they were also having unusually warmer summers too--their cars and stores were not equiped with air conditioners, so many people died of heat stroke.
Ah yes, I remember coming down from the Tetons in Casper, Wyoming, as a storm hit. No guard rails on the side of the mountain roads then (early or mid-1980s). A gust of wind spun us around about three times. We landed in a ditch, and the salt truck arrived five seconds later.
A friend in Seattle reports that the city bus is now able to get up the hill outside her house. "Spring is here!"
The wedding... yes, the wedding. Eventually. Hmm... we've been engaged for about half as long as we've been together, and that's been since 1996. (Would you believe that we met because of the Animaniacs version of "Schnitzelbank"?)
But it's rather pointless to get married if we can't afford a place together. Ah, California... We're looking. Her parents are going to help considerably on paying for the place, so we're a bit at their mercy in terms of what they're willing to spend -- plus the limited geography given our workplaces being 40 miles apart thus we'd rather like someplace in between.
Back on the subject of driving, this past weekend, the electric road signs in California bore the message "DONT TEXT WHILE DRIVING, JAN 1ST". I mean, yeah, sure, it's a law starting January 1st, but couldn't they have omitted that date, rather than suggesting, "but go ahead and text all you want for now, 'cause, you know, it's not like it's insanely stupid and dangerous or anything..."??
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