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.

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.

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.

Ever since posting this it’s been cloudy and I’ve been wearing long sleeves, pants, and socks.  Three days of summer and it’s too much for the locals, who are all thrilled with our newfound lack of sun.

Given all the bitching I do around here about how it’s never summer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t post this.

At 10:31 PM it was 90 degrees inside this house.  Two hours later it had cooled down to 88.

That was Wednesday when we broke the all-time of 100 degrees by three degrees.  We also broke the all-time high low of 69 by two degrees.

With about two weeks left in faltering, I figured we could now wrap-up the never-snow totals for this year.

If the search functionality on MPL is working right, the last never-snow was here, when Beckers and Isabelita reported never-snow.  That was number 16.  16 conservatively called never-snows (remember, I only counted the monster Christmas storm I was absent for as one never-snow).  Beckers says there was one dusting in mid- to late-May she didn’t report, and if memory serves, My Baby reported never-snow on the Eastside after that, but it was vague enough and far enough away I didn’t count it.

There you have it.  When I first moved here i thought it only never-snowed two or threetimes a year, because that’s how much we had my first winter.  My second winter we were up around double digts, and my third winter we hit 16.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go through the ritual of forgetting all of this and enjoy “summer.”

Beckers reported never-snow for at least 5 minutes in Kent on 4/1/09.  I say it was God saying, “April Fools, you live in Seattle.”

That same day, Learning To Sequence reported that it snowed “all morning” about 8 miles north of MPL HQ:

So despite not getting any never-snow at MPL HQ on April 1st, we were surrounded by it to the north and south, so we’re counting it.  That’s number 16 on the season.

In that same post, Learning To Sequence also reported the coldest March on record, which would mean that in the roughly three years I’ve lived here, I’ve experienced the rainiest month ever (November 2006) and the coldest March ever.

KOMO News, though, reports it was actually it was the coldest march since ‘76.  I was born in ‘74, so that’s kind of like “ever.”  It also reports that with the April 1st never-snow that it was Seattle’s 6th-snowiest [sic] season on record at 23.3″  I know 23.3″ isn’t a lot of snow for a place like, say, Minneapolis, but it is a f**k of a lot of never-snow.  You try living amid 23.3″ of never-snow that they don’t move off of the streets.