Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Now, it was an historically mild winter here, I’ll give you that.  However, there’s still no excuse for, in the first few days of April, however cool they might be, me hearing questions about “what happened to spring?” from passersby and reading idiocy like this from the local press.

Ah, spring!

We went to bed last night with the slight threat of some snowflakes in Seattle and woke Friday morning to a continuing winter storm warning in the Cascades.

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What in the name of tulips and daffodils is going on?

Gasp!  [Never-]snow in April?  Oh my god, this is just CRAAAZY!  Please, somebody, provide me with some reason and sense of perspective.

“Every once in a while we can get snow in the lowlands in April,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jeff Michalski said.

Every once in a while?  Can we get even more reasonable than that in this oh-so-poorly organized tripe?

Records show April snowfall is nothing new in Puget Sound.

Ah, there we go.  Now, why are we writing this article again?

On April 8, 2008, the State Patrol warned students leaving on spring break vacations to prepare for winter driving conditions when crossing the passes. The day before, about three inches of snow fell on the Cascades and the weekend before avalanches on westbound lanes of Interstate 90 caused a 10-mile backup.

Snow continued until mid April of that year….

This is what it’s come to folks.  People are running around screaming about the cold spring and (oh my god) never-snow in early April and two years ago we had it in mid-April.  Stop. The. Presses.

Here’s the kicker, though.  Here’s where everything comes full circle and I’m left screaming at the stupidity of all that surrounds me.  This is the part that sums up my entire relationship between Seattlites and their relationship with weather.

April 17, 1972, saw the latest snowfall in recorded Seattle history, according to the National Weather Service. Meteorologists at the time said it wasn’t unusual, even though a P-I account shows the large snowflakes that fell in North Seattle made one person drive with snow tires.

Okay, there are two problems with that paragraph.  First is that the ‘even though’ shouldn’t be an ‘even though’ as the sentence doesn’t even make sense with it in there.  It should be something more like ‘and’.  I mean, what does the commonality of never-snow in mid-April have to do with the never-snow being so severe that they put on never-snow tires?

But looking past that (and oh my god this is a horribly written article), here’s how this article goes if you haven’t been keeping track:

1. Oh my god this never-snow in April is crazy!
2. But actually it’s not that crazy.
3. As proof, here’s an article from our own publication a few years ago about how, despite how crazy never-snow in April seemed, we actually determined at that time that it wasn’t all that crazy.  Why are newspapers dying again?

God I hate stupid.  And this is stupid.

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.

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.

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

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[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.

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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.

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.

We woke up to a few fluffy flakes yesterday morning, and My Baby reported full-on never-snow at the top of the hill.  It’s borderline, but I’m going to call it because we’ve been so conservative overall this year.

Two more never-snows, bringing the season’s total to 14, and with continued cold temperatures predicted here, we could continue to see the total rise this week.

Saturday night saw never-snow number 13.  It was really coming down, and we even got a little bit of accumulation.  Beckers also reported never-snow Saturday morning outside MPL’s near-Burien satellite office and did some on-location reporting of never-snow in Capitol Hill on Saturday night.  But we’re just going to count this as one.

It’s tough to know how to distinguish one “never-snow” from another.  Because it was still never-snowing when I woke up on Sunday, and then we had several hours of bright blue, sunny skies, and then more never-snow on Sunday night.  So I’m going to count that as a separate never-snow, but I’m also going to lump it in with the never-snow that was occurring when I woke up today, so there’s 14 on the season.

It’s been about 13 weeks since the first never-snow of the season, so we’re stlil over that once-per-week pace since mid-December.

Here’s a picture of what I woke up to on Thursday morning.

With at least four inches on my car, that’s 12 never-snows this season. The first never-snow of the season was fewer than 11 weeks ago, meaning that, even with counting that crazy week before Christmas as just one never-snow, it’s never-snowed, on average, more than once a week this season.

I thought Obama was gonna fix this crap.

Independent observations from Beckers, My Baby, and yours truly concur that this one hardly phased Seattlites.  They got out of their houses, into their cars, and drove to work as if it were a normal faltering day.  Maybe they’re just thrilled to still have a job so it’s not worth the risk anymore of sharing the illusion that a never-snow here is cause for a day off of work.

In contradiction to this seeming acceptance of never-snow, though, My Baby had an encounter at work with a recent transplant from the Bay Area who expressed his surprise that he had to trudge through what he called “snow” in his new hometown.  Fair enough, guy, Seattle doesn’t have a reputation as a snowy town, and you’ve only been here four weeks.  Here’s the kicker, though: He told My Baby that he had been told it only snows once every 10 years here.  (It’s not the snow, it’s the never-snow….)  And since he’s only been here four weeks, this was told to him by people who not only have experienced the never-snow of all three falterings that I’ve lived here but were brutalized by that week before Christmas that caused the papers to fly into a Seattle-style “outrage” (“Please consider having a snow plan in place, if you don’t mind”) and about which we were holding public hearings just a few weeks ago.  Once every 10 years?  Try 10 days…or even more frequently this year.

The Seaddlusion is more deep-seated than we ever could have imagined.

It never-snowed all over me when I was on my way to campus yesterday.  That’s 11.

F.