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.

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.

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.

For an explanation of what’s going on, you can start tracing back the re-stating of the vows tradition with last year’s post.

This year we went camping near Cle Elum, a city 80 miles east of here that gets 300 days of sun a year where we’re considering getting some property.  Well, we were going to go camping but every campsite was filled so we ended up at a resort.  It was like Frasier and Lillith go camping.

Anyway, here is the public re-statement of my wedding vows.  This year’s addition is in bold.

Baby,
I promise you that I will always be the things that made you fall in love with me: honest and transparent, funny and witty, open-minded and creative, adoring.
I promise you i will never stop pampering and courting you.
I promise you will always be my muse, and I will draw daily inspiration from you.  I promise to return the favor by trying to inspire you daily.
I promise to work on being a better husband: to talk to you, to tell you what I’m feeling, and to engage in continual self-evaluation.
I promise to prioritize us, without sacrificing you or me.  I promise to always make room for us in my life, and to make sure you know when I think we need to adjust to get to the right level of us in both of our lives.
I promise to try to love the things about you that are just in your nature, such as the telltale hair monster left behind everywhere you’ve been.
I promise to make a fuss over you when you’re sick, to love you and support you and take your side when you’ve had a bad day.  I promise to listen to you tell me about your bad day and to refrain from giving you unsolicited solutions.
I promise that I will do my best to learn how we are as one, and to take into account how my mood and actions affect you.
I promise to try to recover quickly from disagreements.  I promise to do my best to stay on the high road.  And I promise to forgive and forget mistakes said and done in the heat of the moment.
I promise to be stubbornly filled with determined, creative solutions to the most gridlocked, vexing situations we encounter
I promise you that I will help you and support you to achieve your dreams.  And I promise that, with your support, I will pursue my mine as well.  I promise never to stop taking new risks and adventures with you.
I promise you physical, emotional, and mental fidelity.  I promise that you will always be my baby that i adore completely with my mind, body, and soul, and i promise to trust that you adore me as well.
I promise to be vigilant in never letting you forget that you are the most wonderful, most beautiful woman in the world.  i promise to set the husband you, as the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world, deserve, as the impossible ideal i will strive to be.
And above all, baby, I promise to be always on your team.  And I will do my best to make our team the envy of every other team at the party of life.

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.”