moe’s mom was supposed to be here for christmas eve dinner, but the ice-pocalypse has still got us in its icy grip… mind you, issaquah-hobart road has been chemically de-iced and plowed, and for every other place in the greater seattle metropolitan area, the roads are passable, at worst… but i had to walk out to the park at the corner of hobart-ravensdale road, this afternoon, to pick up a package, because the fedex driver, the USPS driver, a door-dash driver, and a tow truck had a “confligration” (complete with flashing lights and everything) at the top of our neighbourhood. there were two cars that passed me on the way to the park, which i’m not sure whether they got through or not, and there were two more cars that passed me on the way back… and i’m not sure whether or not they got through either…
so, conditionally, moe’s mom is coming for dinner tomorrow (after it has been >50° for more than 24 hours), along with scott and nancy (our friends from up the road towards issaquah about 10 miles), and that means that moe has decided that she has to make TWO dinners… she had originally planned to make indian food for dinner with scott and nancy, but her mom won’t eat indian food, so she’s getting enough steak for dinner, and to take back so she can have left-overs tomorrow… and, because of the fact that steak night was supposed to be tonight, moe made pasta tonight…
so, around here, anyway, it’s not so much a “snow”pocalypse as it is an “ice”pocalypse… there was only about two inches of snow last night at 9:00, but it was really windy overnight, and my guess is that it sleeted and/or freezing-rained enough that, this morning, there’s two inches of what LOOKS LIKE snow, but is, in reality, one to one-and-a-half inches of old crusty snow that has been TOTALLY ENCASED in a clear layer of ice… there’s ice on all the tree branches, and our slight incline out the garage door into the back yard has become totally impassable — unless you want to slide on your ass… it’s supposed to warm up and mostly dissipate by tomorrow, and the high tomorrow is supposed to be 50°… but, despite the fact that it is “warming up”, currently, it’s “warming” from yesterday’s low of 14° to a somewhat-more-normal 31°, and it’s supposed to start snowing at noon, and continue until 7:00 or so… in other parts of the metropolitan area, king county metro is COMPLETELY shut down, and seatac airport has gone from COMPLETELY shut down, to having one runway open, and alaska airlines cancelling 100% of their flights out of seatac today. moe says the last time she remembers this happening was in 1996, but then it wasn’t anticipated, which made things that much worse.
ETA: it is now 1:30 pm, and it’s 33° and raining… which, of course, means later on, when the temperature once again dips below freezing, that we will have SEVERAL LAYERS of increasing thicknesses of ice. woo. i’m SO glad i don’t have to go anywhere for the next few days. 😒
it started snowing in fits and starts sunday evening, after the panto. it mostly melted yesterday, and it was raining hard this morning… but then, around 11:00, it changed from rain to grauple, and then to sleet, and then to snow… and it transitioned back and forth between rain and snow at least three times before it got dark, which means that our beautifully plowed street (for a change!) is now two inches or so deep in slush, ice, and snow. i went out this afternoon around 1:00, and on my way home i saw two cars off the road on hobart-ravensdale road, one of which was a fairly substantial jeep or something like that, which had been going uphill and slid off the road facing oncoming traffic… which was complicated by a row of oncoming cars which were stopped because of the aforementioned jeep, which was just after a curve in the road. once i got past the conflagration, i encountered a large semi-truck with a huge piece of equipment on the trailer, which was tooling along at an elevated rate of speed, as though there weren’t about 8 cars that were stopped a thousand or so feet further up the road… 😒
it’s not really deep, but it’s REALLY slick, and people around here don’t know how to drive when it’s slick… which, of course, doesn’t stop them from trying, and failing in the most spectacular ways. 😒
fortunately, i don’t HAVE TO drive ANYWHERE until after the first of january, and, hopefully, it will all be gone by then. 😒
day NINE of more than one foot of snow, and it’s currently snowing at this very moment!
i tried getting out to ship out the IOTM orders this morning, and didn’t even make it out of the driveway before getting stuck!
220103 stuck car
this is not fun any more. 😒
although, it’s a good thing i got stuck when i did, because i could have made it halfway down the street, or halfway to the middle-of-nowhere post office before getting stuck, which would be even worse…
[ETA] moe came home early, and informed me that there is a tree down across the road, about 150 yards up the street from our house, where it can’t be seen from our house… which means that, even if i had gotten out, i wouldn’t have got far. a lady heavy equipment operator came around and plowed the street in front of our house, all the way to the dead end, in exchange for $100. she said she’s been plowing the roads in our neighbourhood for 4 years.
day 5SEVEN of 1+ foot of snow. keeping fingers crossed, but no power outage yet. at this point, the main roads are slushy, and some of them are bare and wet, but the street in front of our house has few enough tire prints that i can still count them. last year someone eventually plowed our street, but i don’t know who, and they haven’t done it this year. i brushed all the snow off my car, and ventured out today, because i’ve actually got a unicycle class tomorrow, and i needed to know whether or not to admit defeat, and take monique’s all-wheel-drive car (or the truck). as it is, it’s supposed to get up to 42°F, so i will probably take my car to class.
snow is mostly gone… there’s still some large piles, where whoever it was that ploughed our street piled it up at the head of the road, and in the ditches, but everywhere else, it’s gone.
210222 gutter overflow
i had to take a ladder out and climb up to clean out the gutter, in front. it had collected a bunch of tree detritus and, what with all the melting snow, combined with torrential rain, the gutter was totally clogged and overflowing into our driveway… it all ran away from the house, though, and once i cleared the obstruction, the downspout did what it was supposed to do, so that’s good.
i’m the default tuba player for the SANCApators at the moisture festival, this year. the moisture festival was cancelled, at the last minute, last year (because of COVID), and this year, instead of having live performances, they’re releasing some videos of performers that would have been live, except for COVID… and their regular tuba player is ill (no word on whether or not it’s COVID) and can’t make the videos that they asked for from the musicians, so i got tagged. last week i got the parts, and the tracks to play along with, so i practiced for a few days and sent the videos to “doc” sprinsock, so that he can combine them with everyone else’s videos and — hopefully — get some reasonably “together” music out of the whole deal…
but i’m not holding my breath… particularly with the thing that said “Rock” for the style, but the backing track was played as straight as an arrow, with no “swing” or “rock” stylings at all… and that’s what i played, because there was no way to “swing” a part that hadn’t been recorded to “swing”, so… i’m not holding my breath. we’ll see what happens when everybody else’s videos are part of the mix. 😖
no word on the phremont fillharmonic’s addition to the chaos, yet. i contacted kiki last week, and she said she’d heard about it, but is waiting for further instructions from “the powers that be”, whoever that is.
and i think the antidepressant may be working. i’m not sure i agree with georgia doctor, who wanted to boost my prescription back up to the level that was causing me frantic anxiety and restlessness, plus she wanted to add ANOTHER antidepressent — lexapro — to the mix. at the time, i wasn’t sure whether it was working or not, so i said i’d rather wait on the new scrip until i had a better idea of whether the current one was working, and she agreed to hold off… which is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is reinforcing personal boundaries.
and she had never heard of psilocybin… 🤯
because of her accent, i asked where she’s from, and she said she’s from “africer”… but i can’t imagine a psychiatric nurse-practitioner who has never heard of psilocybin. i said that the “common” name for them is “magic mushrooms”, and she immediately started ranting about heroin and cocaine, and said that it’s possible that they contained psilocybin… 😕
so i still don’t have any solid information about the interaction of bupropion and psilocybin, which is a little scary, but within tolerable limits. and actual mushrooms are still a ways off, yet, so there’s still time to gather more information.
but the fact that there’s some “good” stuff happening in my life seems to indicate that something has changed.
we still have anywhere from 2 to 6 inches of mud, slush, almost snow, or sort-of snow, on everything that is unpaved (which includes both of our driveways), but once we get past the driveway, everything has been plowed, and the snow is melting rapidly, even at night.
the hobart post office has a graphic up behind the window which is a picture of the grinch in a santa claus hat, and the legend “LET IT SNOW… somewhere else!”. i would tend to agree, in spite of the blatant intelectual property theft. 😒
tomorrow i have my circus class (YAY! 🤡) and an eye appointment. thursday i get my second covid vaccine.
there’s still a lot of snow, pretty much everywhere…
but it’s 44°F and raining, and the forcast doesn’t get below 37°F for the rest of the week…
we’re probably going to have snow around the edges for a few more days, but my guess is that it will go away quickly.
ETA: okay, apparently today is “presidents day” — it’s my recollection that it’s actually the 16th 22nd, but today is monday, or some horseshit like that — anyway, i’m pissed off because i actually thought i would drive down to the post office to ship out a package i got the order for on sunday…
yeah, driving and snow don’t mix, but i learned to drive in the snow, so i figured it would be okay, just to go down to the little store and back, right?
i had to clear 11½ inches of snow, ice, and slush from all over my car.
then i had to get it out of the driveway. then i had to drive it up to where there were tire tracks that i could use to get some traction — fortunately, they started in front of our neighbours’ house, next door. then i had to navigate the tire tracks which were OBVIOUSLY made by a larger vehicle than mine, so i could only get the right set of tires, or the left set of tires into the track, and the other side was sliding along the center space, where the snow, ice, and slush were higher than the bottom of my car. then i had to navigate those same tire tracks up a hill that kids have been sledding down for three days. then i had to pull over to the side so that two cars that were going in the opposite directions could get by. then i had to pull onto a busy, 50-mile-an-hour road (not a freeway, or even a highway: it’s hobart-ravensdale road, otherwise known as 276th avenue southeast) from a dead stop on a road covered with ice. then, i had to pull into the parking lot, which was full of ice and a disabled car…
THEN i found out that the post office was closed because of some FUCKING holiday! 🤬
so i reversed my course.
completely.
okay, so i didn’t back into the driveway, like i usually do. and i didn’t pull as far into the driveway as i usually do, but all in all, i made it out and back, in severely adverse conditions, and i didn’t get stuck ONCE.
grr… stupid fucking holidays for a fucking president that is a total joke… and i’m talking about the current president, as well as the former one. 😒
and don’t look up “presidents day” in wikipedia. it’s full of shite about george washington and the julian calendar. 😒
it’s raining now, but it’s supposed to start snowing again after dark, which is in about an hour…
i walked out to the main road. it’s clear and wet, with patches of slush. the snow accumulation off the road is pretty similar to what we have here… but in order to get out to the main road, you have to drive UP a hill that kids have been sledding on for two days. it’s possible to drive up the hill, but only barely.
and, because of the fact that they’re there, we also had a couple of downed trees. they didn’t hit anything, and they’re not across the road, but it’s not over yet, and i haven’t been out further than the mailbox — it had come open, somehow, and was three-quarters full of snow, which was on top of the letter that i was hoping the letter carrier was going to pick up — so i don’t know what “the real world” is like… supposedly, we have a “micro-climate” around our neighbourhood, and the weather is substantially different about a mile away, on the main road.
this is the one of the… i’m not sure whether it’s an “advantage” or it’s a “danger”… of living in the remote wilderness.
at this point, it’s not an awful lot different than any other day, during COVID. 😒
i get my second covid vaccine a week from thursday (210218), but i’m scheduled to play my first concert in a year on saturday the 13th (9:00 pm, streaming to fecesbook, eventually posted on youtube), and, wouldn’t you know it, cliff mass, the only meteorologist moe believes, is predicting 12 inches of snow, starting thursday and lasting AT LEAST through saturday…
and if it snows, it’s almost guaranteed that i won’t be able to make the concert… 😒
bush collapsed, tree down, driveway blocked… 😐 closeup of the collapsed bush… every single needle was encased in about half an inch of ice. in our back yard… the chainlink fence and weeds encased in ice the bush, free of ice, for comparison.
i wrote a whole bunch of stuff that i realised would go really well in a post that i have scheduled for the 30th, so i incorporated it into that, and now i don’t have anything for today…
wait, yes i do…
SNOW!! 😛
monday, snow pretty much all day. everythingtotally screwed up: jack-knifed trucks shut freeways down, people abandoning cars on the freeway, roads blocked by abandoned/crashed cars and busses, people driving the wrong direction on the freeway, bus flipped sending 10 people to the hospital… total DRAG. tuesday, frozen snow left over from monday. some new, but not very much. roads are a little better, but people got the idea and stayed home, so there wasn’t as much chaos. wednesday, persistent frozen snow from monday, no new snow so far. they’re saying that the weather should be back in the mid-40s and raining tomorrow.
i can’t wait. i hate snow…
no, i don’t hate snow, i hate being cold. i would far rather be too hot than too cold (and when i have the chance, you can’t get me out of a sauna). i also hate having to get somewhere when it’s snowing. not because i can’t drive in the snow (i actually learned to drive in buffalo, new york, where there is 6 to 12 feet of snow, pretty much all winter, every year), but because other people can’t drive in the snow. it’s really, really sad when i am driving my front-wheel-drive ford station wagon with no chains, and i pass up a fully chained hummer that has driven into the ditch and been abandoned… really sad…
