Freezing Weather

If you follow our weather at all, you know we've had it rough. Snow and freezing temperatures, which are uncommon to this area, have wrecked havoc with life in the PacNW. Here is a great video that was shot not too far from our house. (Check out minute 3 for how well city buses did.)

Schools have been closed for the week. Commutes which normally take 30 minutes took 5-7 HOURS yesterday. Bus drivers were giving passengers fast food breaks so they could get food and go to the bathroom after being trapped in traffic for hours. And that's if the bus didn't jacknife on the road or flip over. Arterial roads were snarled, and the interstates were all but shut down.

Believe it or not, this is better than it was two years ago...but just barely. The city tried to get ahead of it with salt trucks, but the cold weather was against them. We also just don't have the equipment or manpower to deal with situations like this. We are up to 30 snowplows - for a city of 600,000. It also doesn't help that because of our proximity to the coast we have an odd weather pattern for snow. It involves very wet snow that quickly melts, then freezes, then snows, melts and freezes over and over. The roads are literally just sheets of ice.

Since we're stranded at home anyway, and the temperature is only 15 degrees, it seemed like a great time to defrost our deep freezer. We hauled all the frozen food outside and set it in the snow, defrosted and cleaned the freezer. It's cooling now, and we should have everything back in it in about an hour.

Kendra and I also made the most of no school today by inviting one of her classmates over. They live just down the hill from us and were able to walk to our place pretty easily. I had hot coffee and coco waiting for them. We had lunch together, the girls played and her older son learned the joy that is Wii. All in all it was a really fun day. Take that weather.