Texty

Rainy, bleak Monday in January. Headache because I didn't sleep well, and (probably) because of the weather.

No word yet on whether my contract is going to be renewed, and had to update my resume* so my agency can find me something else if it isn't.

Too much work to do to completely faff off, but not enough to keep me truly busy and therefore interested/distracted.

Frequent reminders from various sources that I'm considered worthless by most of my metaculture because of (insert fatal flaw here.)

Continuing disappointment because of the adoption cost issue.

...

Oh, yes, I feel terrific today.

Maybe I'll go write some big, long personal filter post to core dump some of this stuff...


*FWIW, I do think I look pretty good on paper, with the exception of no "real" (FTE) recent job history.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it's still annoying. After Snowpocalypse melts away, we're left with tons of water everywhere. Yay, Floodpocalypse. :/

Didn't we just do this last year?

Day two of being snowed in. I'd been hoping it was warm enough this afternoon to melt things down a little bit, but it only got up to 33 for an hour or so, which wasn't nearly enough to melt the foot or so that's still in the driveway. I'm guessing the same thing's going to happen tomorrow, and we're expecting a little more on top overnight.

The annoying bit is that the bottom half of the street has been sort of plowed and sanded and is driveable--enough so that we got FedEx and UPS deliveries today. It's just us four houses at the top of the hill (the dead-end street part) who are screwed. I can see driveable road from my front porch. I just can't get there.

At least we're not as bad as Gresham, which apparently had to call out the National Guard so emergency services could get where they needed to go. My in-laws aren't that far from there, too, so I'm really, really thinking it would be very stupid for us to attempt to drive down there tomorrow or even Thursday.

I'm seriously considering making a Safeway.com order and seeing if they'll actually deliver here. It doesn't get me the meds I need, which have been waiting at the pharmacy for the last three days, but it'd help restock the fridge, which is starting to get scarily low on some items. Not that we're in danger of starving, mind. We're just short on a few staples like bread and juice.

At least the power's been on, more or less, so far (knock on wood.) And we have the ability to work around that somewhat, if needed. I'm just getting a smidgy bit of cabin fever.

4 weeks ago:



( Today: )

More here

The kids in the neighborhood are all outside, shrieking with glee.

M got me some lovely things, including one of these, which is beyond cool.

Going to get the pudding on to steam and clean up the debris of wrap and such. Hope y'all are having a lovely day.

...and cable, including net connect, is down, meaning so is email. Fortunately, my phone seems to have dried out and is fully functional. Yay!

We're ok. Our house is on a stable hill, so the flooding and slides shouldn't get to us. We did go home early as there were closed roads on our usual route home. Not sure yet what we'll do tomorrow. We're supposed to get 3 more days of rain, so things will likely get worse. If we get net connect back, we can work from home, but who knows when that will happen.

We'll at least be reachable by phone, and I'll update here, too. Hope everyone else local is ok.

ETA: We're back online and have been for a few hours. I hope it sticks around, because I plan to work from home as much as possible tomorrow morning to avoid commute hell. All those washed-out, closed roads through Bothell and Woodinville? Yeah, that's our route to work. Yaye. :(

Also? Campus safety folks and WTA are teh suck.

Today, I was supposed to have my first psych and jazz classes, as well as a meeting for the SMFH.

Instead, I am stuck at the apartment. Sans car. You see, I tried to get to campus, but there was all this fluffy white stuff on the ground. I got there in the car, parked in the student lot at the ass end, and planned to take the bus up the hill to north campus, where all my classes for today are (and where parking is not.)

Unfortunately, some idiot WTA driver decided to get stuck at the bottom of said hill, and then got an SUV (ha!) stuck behind the bus. The bus I was on said "fuck that" and turned around and went back downtown, managing to hit a curb on the way. After about 20 minutes at the temporary transfer station (because of course, January is the perfect time to reconstruct the existing one), a bus with chains finally pulled up, and fortunately for moi, happened to be on the line that goes past my apartment (but does not go past campus.) Sensing that I was otherwise going to be stuck in the freezing mess in downtown, I hopped on, and here I am.

Early this morning, there was a light dusting of snow in the courtyard parking lot from a wee spit overnight--maybe half an inch. I'm sure the campus safety folks saw that and said, "Pshaw! 'Tis naught but powdered sugar. We shall delight in its wintry scenicness and think nothing of it." By 10 a.m., when flakes the size of dimes were falling like so much Divine dandruff, they should have reconsidered.

See, there's this modern, newfangled science called meteorology, in which folks with a jones for clouds and what they produce use schmancy equipment and a lot of math to tell us pathetic laypeople to expect the skies to open up and make our lives miserable for a while. While prognostication in this science is imperfect, usually, it's relatively easy even for plebes like yours truly to look at a radar map and say, "Holy shit! There's a precipitation mass the size of Vancouver Island about to collide with a cold front RIGHT OVER MY HOUSE."

Given such information, wise folks plan ahead and stock up with Sterno and s'mores. Wise people who are charged with ensuring the safety of ~20,000 students and employees of a large, regional university look at this and say, "By gum, I think this might be a corker, Bob! Given the facts that the city doesn't own a snowplow and approximately 95 percent of the local population doesn't know how to drive or walk on snow, we should think about pre-emptively closing campus to make sure no one gets hurt! Don't you remember the hellish storm we had just a couple of months ago?"

But, of course, that would be intelligent forethought, and we're Americans; we can't have that. What, are you some terrorist or something?

The somewhat happy ending to this saga is that the university does have a policy about inclement weather that allows students to miss a class if they don't feel they have a safe way to get to and around campus. Despite missing the first day of three classes, I shouldn't suffer too badly, especially given that one has a large Blackboard component and another has most of the in-class lecture material posted on the department's servers. The only really unfortunate absence is the SMFH's meeting, and I suspect they'll forgive me.

Of far greater concern is how the hell I'm getting back to my car. I'm guessing WTA might actually have most of their buses chained up within a couple of hours, so perhaps I can get back up to campus before everything freezes over after dark. I can hope.

Posting from my groovy phone, which will soon be off to not drain the battery.

We've been w/o power since midnight. Prolly won't have it back for at least as long as it takes them to untie the Gordian knot of trees, poles and lines currently blocking part of the street that leads out to the main drag. At least we're better off than nearby neighbors,who had a tree come crashing through their house last night.

No e-mail, since the server has no power, but the home phone works if anyone needs us.

In the meantime, we're staying warm and communing with the cats by the fire.

So, the NWS has issued another winter storm watch for tomorrow evening through Thursday morning. More cold temps plus another storm front. Welcome to freezing rain, most likely. Yuck. I'm going to try to drive up to B'ham tomorrow before the next wave hits. Classes may not be in session again, but I still need to be there to help work on the Friday issue, among other duties.

Those who are from higher elevations or generally colder regions may think we're being wimps about this here. Speaking as someone who was born and raised at 4500 feet, let me tell you: this is not standard mountain snow.

What sucks about this climate is that it rarely gets and stays cold for any length of time. What happens is that we get a dump of snow over a day or so, then temps warm up enough to either melt the top of the snow layer and/or add rain to it. Then it freezes over again overnight. So what we have isn't layers of powder--or even packed powder--but layers of solid ice, most of which has melted/refrozen in very uneven surface patterns.

When you're driving on snow, assuming you have snow tires and a fairly heavy vehicle, you can cut a path through the stuff. The act of compacting the snow will give you traction. Yes, it's still slippery, but it's something for the tires to grab onto. The stuff we get here isn't like that. It's more like trying to drive over a rock-solid Chihuly sculpture dipped in Astroglide. The only way you get traction on that is if you have chains, studs or they've been kind enough to dump a load of fresh sand on the street. Note, too, that this must be fresh. Older layers of sand only get sunk down into the permafrost layer during the melting/refreezing cycle.

So if you're tempted to point and laugh--don't. We generally get mild winters with maybe one or two light snowstorms (at least in the lowlands.) But when we get a big one, it's nasty, nasty, nasty. This is definitely the worst storm cycle since the horror of December 96.

Wish us luck and warmth. We're going to need it.