Miss Piggy Lunchbox

No matter how busy I get with baby prep (currently I’m trying to bank hours on my contract so I can take some time off and spending any extra time working on his/her welcome-to-our-home-this-is-what-you-will-like mix CD), one topic that will break my writing fast is never-snow.

You’d never-know there was never-snow this year, with our 10-to-20-degrees-above-average season, but Beckers comes through with a report of number two on the season, this time just north of the airport (which is south of the city) on I-5 and also in the suburb of Kent.

Cliff Mass, in his usual exhaustingly breathless style, reports in as well.

It has been an incredibly mild faltering.  We’ve had a few wind storms, hardly any never-snow, and much warmer temperatures then normal.  In fact, it was the warmest January on record in Seattle.

It’s been nice, that’s for sure, in terms of driving conditions, general comfort, and the gas bill.  The cloud contained in this silver lining, though?  These warm temps, while nice in January, are more typical, not of February or March, but April.  Meaning I have a lot of crappy Aprils to look forward to.

The really crazy part about it, though, comes at the end of that blog post.

Today while walking through the UW campus I was surprised to see a number of the cherry trees in blossom and many daffodils in full flower.

I’m not even sure I believe it since I haven’t seen it myself.  The last three years those trees haven’t reached bloom until spring break, which is the last week of March.  This puts them two months ahead of schedule, which is just plain eerie.  Though I have noticed some bushes blooming around here several weeks ahead of schedule.  Still…two months?  Might faltering end early this year?  I won’t get my hopes up.

Your regularly scheduled blog will resume (shortly?).

This is probably really boring for you, but fyi there are really two things holding me back right now.

One is that the new expensive computer I bought is not behaving (a big FU to Sony).  Sometimes it hangs and the task manager won’t even launch, and sometimes when it does even killing processes from the process tree doesn’t work.  The second thing it likes to do to tick me off is to just turn itself off with no warning.  Fwip, it’s gone.  Anyway, I’m just hesitant to put anything else, like iTunes and all the other CD reviewing infrastructure, on this because I’m considering wiping it clean anyway.

The second thing keeping me from jumping back into the blogging full speed ahead is that My Baby has asked me to pick a CD (just one) that Our Baby can listen to in the womb so that it will be soothed by that CD after birth.  An initial pass through my collection resulted in about 80 CDs that made the “possible” cut, so all of my listening time is going toward paring that stack down.  I should have one picked out by June (that’s a joke…the kid’s due in March).

Anyway, I really should recommend eBits PC Laptop here (I used the Capitol Hill location but the same guy runs the U District location).  They cleaned out the fan in my old laptop real nice, and it lasted for a few weeks before dying again, at which point they replaced the fan with a new one, charging me only for the part.  And they were fast about it, too, at least the second time around.  We got off to a bit of a rough start on the customer service responsiveness front, but once they realized I was a high-touch customer they became responsive.  I would definitely go there again.

Oh, and if there’s a third thing keeping me from blogging it’s the complete lack of never-snow.  It’s been very warm here.  Last weekend it was considerably warmer here than it was in Miami.  You can read about it in full-on breathless style here.

Anyway, I’ve still got lots of CDs to review, so I will be back.  Thanks for hanging in there.

Clear as a bell and cold the last week-and-a-half.  I love it.  Feels like winter.

We’ve had a bit of a problem with the killing of cops here in the Pacific Northwest this fall, and my neighborhood has been right in the middle of it.

The Seattle officer that was gunned down with no provocation was stopped just six blocks or so away from here when he lost his life.  There was a police truck, memorial, and round-the-clock news coverage on the scene 24 hours a day for the next week.

And the one you heard about, the nut who killed those four officers, also completely without provocation, in Lakewood last Sunday was hiding out in one of his family member’s houses a couple of blocks closer to me than where the first cop was killed.  Our neighborhood was shut off all night last Sunday night with a traffic stop two houses away, cop cars and motorcycles speeding past, two helicopters overhead, and the sounds of the police trying to force him out with loudspeakers.  I drove through in the morning on the way to campus just after they went into the house to find out he’d escaped and it was another zoo of police and media.

It sounds like they got their man in both cases, the first alive and the second dead.

Reset your counters, because on Friday Beckers reported never-snow deposits on cars in Shoreline.  For those out-of-town readers, Shoreline is a suburb about 15-minutes-with-no-traffic north of downtown Seattle, which puts it well within the Seattle metro area, and, heck, since Beckers commutes there for work the Shoreline weather affects a significant portion of MPL’s readership, so we’re counting it.  Never-snow season is here…maybe a week or two early, but pretty much right on time.

Yeah, it’s November, which means two out of every three days feature cold temperatures, 30 mph winds gusting to 50 mph all night and day, hour after hour after hour of steady, cold rain, and just a few hours of “daylight.”  It’s a joy.  I doubt I’ll make it through tonight or tomorrow with electricity, and when the storm season started last week, I saw this fun report in the paper last Sunday, November 8th.

The forecast calls for another wet, windy storm late tonight through Monday, with gusts up to 50 mph.

…

That translated into up to 1 ½ inches of rain over 48 hours and high wind gusts.

…

[I]n Westport, unusually large ocean swells of up to 23 feet hammered the town’s jetty on Saturday, flooding the marina district with up to 14 inches of water, said Westport police Officer Chuck Cunningham.

On Saturday afternoon, 20-foot swells were coming in 17-second intervals, forcing businesses to put sandbags at their doors. The biggest problem, Cunningham said, was caused by cars driving through the flooded streets, causing wakes that topped the sandbags.

…

Burke, the meteorologist, said the next storm should dump about a half-inch of rain in Seattle and several inches in the mountains.

The most unusual element of the recent storms, he said, was the “lineup” of thunder and lightning Thursday night. Except for that, the weather has been predictable for fall in Seattle.

“Everybody is always surprised by the fall, and yet it comes every year,” said Burke.

That last sentence pretty much sums up the three-way hate-love-hate triangle I have with Seattlites and the Seattle weather.  They’re all like the abused partner in a relationship, convinced that if we could just see the real Seattle we’d see that it’s really wonderful weather here.

I just wanted to remind my Seattle readers that, as your ballots are arriving now, I’m still running for mayor.

In this installation in Seattle Center the water seeps out from under the bench on the right and flows downhill to the grate on the left.

In a city where watching water drain is almost a year-round activity, I’m not sure if this installation is…no, I’m sure, this is just redundant.  Maybe a way for the locals to feel comforted if it’s been dry for a week.

Who green-lighted this thing?

The first rainy and mildly windy day of the season and of course our power is out, with the absolute incompetence so beloved by this region’s inhabitants fully on display.  Wouldn’t want people to know things could actually be done correctly…then there would be expectations.

Seattle City Light employee: Okay, I’ll let the dispatchers know.  [Sigh].  I’m not sure how long it will be because we don’t have a report of an outage.
Me:  Ummm, I’m reporting an outage right now.

If either of the bumblef**ks running for mayor can convince me they’ll be able to keep my power on, or s**t, even that they can get it turned back on within a reasonable amount of time with only one phone call, they’d get my vote for sure.

Update: Overheard while getting some wifi at Starbucks: “It usually just spits at you here in Seattle.”  Which means it “just mists” here.  BS.  The ratio of full-fledged rain to just-mist is about 4:1.  I have no idea why this myth persists.  Maybe it’s all the a-holes in their cars who don’t know what it’s like to wait at the bus or walk across campus when it’s raining.

I hate everybody.  I’ve got my full-on hate going.  Monday it was funny-looking people…today it’s people who are breathing.

Came home from a weekend out of town on Sunday evening to find our place had been broken into and we’d been robbed.  Which sucks.

Went to Facebook to send somebody a message.  Never have my connections’ statuses on Facebook seemed so inane…which is saying a lot.