<body>

Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Why Seattle is still shut down.

"We're trying to create a hard-packed surface," said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. "It doesn't look like anything you'd find in Chicago or New York."


Uh, yeah, Chicago and New York actually keep functioning when snow falls.

I've been willing to cut Seattle a lot of slack on the snow and ice issue over the years. We see such small, infrequent snowfalls around here it's understandable that they don't have the stores of snow removal equipment and supplies that real cold-weather cities have. I'm sympathetic the the difficulties presented by Seattle's numerous, dramatically steep hills. But when your "plan" for snow is to "create a [slippery-as-hell, totally unsafe for man or machine] hard-packed surface" on purpose on those occasions when we do have significant cold and snow... I have to call that plan one of the stupidest things I've ever heard! STUPID.

How many businesses, already struggling due to the economy, are seeing their desperate Christmas retail hopes dashed because people and goods can't move where they need to go? How many workers have had to literally risk their lives trying to get to work because they can't afford to go without pay or work for companies that don't offer anything in the way of paid compensation for "sick" days/snow days/acts of nature? How many people have been injured as a result of these icy roads? What's been the toll in property damage? Of course, the brunt of this policy is borne by the individual citizens of Seattle and not the City itself.

Sorry Seattle, you know I love you but this is screwed up.

Labels: , ,

 
 

Snow and more snow


Chris's handiwork
Originally uploaded by Nikchick.
Seattle's the kind of place where we get snow once a year or so. If it sticks, it stays around for a day or two and then it's gone and that's that. Or so I used to say (just like I used to say that we only got about one week of hot weather so you don't really need any air conditioning). The last few years we've seen a different pattern, that's for sure.

Seattle's snow started last weekend during Kate's birthday party. Gigantic, wet, clumpy flakes fell from the sky and I allowed seven squealing girls to run outside to a mostly-empty parking lot to play in it at 11:30 at night, to their great delight. Flakes were caught on tongues, snowballs made and thrown, until cold and wet I herded them all back to bed.

Getting home the next day was tricky. The big hill leading to our house was closed, snow was compacted on our street, making it very slippery and icy. It stayed like that until rains came and cleared almost all the snow away by Tuesday. Schools were opening 2 hours late, but it seemed like it was merely precautionary.

Wednesday the weather forecast was for Seattle to get dumped on, and school was canceled altogether but we saw nothing. Not a flake. In fact, the streets were clearer than they'd been in several days. I actually spent most of the day out running errands because things were so unremarkable, though everywhere around Seattle got snow. It was like we were in a little bubble.

Before going to bed I watched the weather report where the meteorologist announced that we were going to see a "dusting" of snow sometime on Thursday afternoon and left Kate a note telling her that school would be on so she should get her long-sleeved shirts out of the dryer when she got up. HA, the joke was on me as Seattle's meteorologists are apparently about as good as Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day. We awoke to several inches of snow and school canceled!

Chris cleared the snow from the front and back walks, using the makeshift tools we had on hand. See, we never get enough snow to worry about shoveling... so he used a garden spade and a leaf rake to get the job done, and did quite a good job at that.

Friday Chris braved the elements to go to work but with buses running on snow routes or not at all it was a fiasco and took hours to make it there and back each way. Sidewalks downtown were completely iced over and dangerous to walk on... thankfully he fell only once and didn't get hurt, but it was clear last week that trying to make it downtown in this weather is pretty crazy. Friday I also drove Kate to her dad's, where she's spending Christmas for the first time in many years. It took me an hour to dig my car out, drive the icy roads to the Zipcar, dig the Zipcar out, and get back to the house, then I had to make my way around detours and road closures to get onto the freeway. Freeways were pretty clear until I got pretty far north (where they'd seen up to 20 inches) but streets and on-ramps in Seattle (and in Burlington once I got off the freeway) were crazy. Friday was the day that two charter buses slid down and icy hill, through a barrier, and almost crashed down onto the I-5 freeway. We figured that was the worst of it.

Saturday we made it out. The day was clear and bright but we were heeding the warnings that more snow was on the way. We ran errands, tried in vain to find a snow shovel or salt, bought a little space heater so our unheated upstairs bathroom wouldn't freeze, stocked up on food, toilet paper, the necessities... stood in crazy lines at the stores and tried in vain to get gas for the car but the station was out of gas!

We cautiously made it home as the snow started to come down again Saturday afternoon, this time in sharp, icy little crystals... no longer the fluffy, clumpy stuff but a zillion tiny flakes the size of grains of sand, blowing at angles and eventually coming in sideways, pelting the windows and the side of the house all night. It continued to snow with the occasional break through all of Sunday. Chris and I stayed under covers, ate soup and watched movies and barely cleared 500 steps according to our pedometers.

This morning things are completely covered. Bus routes across Seattle are canceled outright our running on reduced runs. We live on top of a hill and getting anywhere means going down pretty steep hills in any direction (and then trying to get back up again) but our hills are nothing compared to the hill Ray and Christine live on (which I've discovered thanks to this Google Map is a 19% grade the third steepest hill in all of Seattle).





Poor Chris's handiwork has been completely obliterated, though.

Luckily, we're stocked. I'm always prepared for things like food, drinks (including booze and coffee). We've got batteries, we've got heat, we've got hot water (and hopefully no cracked pipes to uncover when we thaw!), the Internet is up, and we've got games and books and movies and music galore. If we're stuck inside for several more days, it'll all be ok. And if nothing else, I've got Twitter to keep me company.

 
 

Around here

My mother's called me several times in the last couple of weeks, usually to talk about things like what Kate wanted for her birthday or to check to make sure the package she sent arrived (she was permanently scarred after the UPS store sent my package with my grandmother's ring in it across town). After my grandma's health crisis I convinced her to go in for routine testing and to get her sleep apnea looked at. To my surprise, she actually did it and was happily sharing her excellent test results with me (a first). This afternoon I noticed the little icon that lets me know that I've missed a call on my cell phone. She didn't leave a message but I called back anyway. She'd been calling about something insignificant, like how Kate liked her birthday present, and chatted about that first before breaking the news to me that she wouldn't be coming up for Christmas with my brother after all because they've just confirmed that her husand has prostate cancer. He's told my mom that his doctor said it hasn't spread but told his daughter (and some random yahoos down at the bar while he was drunk) that it had spread "to his abdomen." He's going in for further tests after Christmas.

Of course this is the alcoholic, verbally abusive, chain-smoking good-for-nothing who has been taking money out of her bank account to gamble and leaving a permanent divot in her couch while the house has been literally falling down around them. He's the reason I don't visit more, the reason I've stopped sending Kate to spend time there. I can't count the number of Christmases that have been ruined because he (and all of his similarly drunken, abusive, chain-smoking children) were spending the holidays extra drunk. I asked my mom frankly once if he had to get sober to keep her would he? She scoffed. He wouldn't. The whole thing makes me very sad.

In a detached kind of way I'm sorry for him. I'm sorry he's having to face cancer the way I'd be sorry for a stranger I'd heard about on the news or something. I'm sorry for my mom, sorry that she'll have to carry his burden. But I can't bring myself to feel broken-hearted or anything. In fact, I'll admit that I see this as an opportunity for my mom to get out from under this thing she got herself into... and I feel a little ashamed at myself for thinking things like "Well, maybe everyone would be better off...". If faced with attending a funeral I don't think I could even appear sad... just be there for my mom (like I was for their wedding in the first place) and support the family who do love and miss him. And, of course, we're getting way ahead of ourselves here in thinking of death and funerals anyway. Prostate cancer is quite treatable, if the stubborn old fool actually goes through with it (apparently "after he has a few toddies" he starts talking about how he's not going to let them cut him open, not going to go through treatment).

He's such a pitiable person, so unable to cope, so hopelessly addicted (and unwilling to change) that in my best moments I can only feel sorry for him, pity him. In my worst moments, I feel hope that he will die so his poisonous influence will just go away and I feel truly ashamed about that. I would love to believe that I'm a better person than that but I have to face up to the fact that the weakest and worst parts of me are, indeed, that bad. Tough stuff.

Labels: ,

 
 

Around here

My mother's called me several times in the last couple of weeks, usually to talk about things like what Kate wanted for her birthday or to check to make sure the package she sent arrived (she was permanently scarred after the UPS store sent my package with my grandmother's ring in it across town). After my grandma's health crisis I convinced her to go in for routine testing and to get her sleep apnea looked at. To my surprise, she actually did it and was happily sharing her excellent test results with me (a first). This afternoon I noticed the little icon that lets me know that I've missed a call on my cell phone. She didn't leave a message but I called back anyway. She'd been calling about something insignificant, like how Kate liked her birthday present, and chatted about that first before breaking the news to me that she wouldn't be coming up for Christmas with my brother after all because they've just confirmed that her husand has prostate cancer. He's told my mom that his doctor said it hasn't spread but told his daughter (and some random yahoos down at the bar while he was drunk) that it had spread "to his abdomen." He's going in for further tests after Christmas.

Of course this is the alcoholic, verbally abusive, chain-smoking good-for-nothing who has been taking money out of her bank account to gamble and leaving a permanent divot in her couch while the house has been literally falling down around them. He's the reason I don't visit more, the reason I've stopped sending Kate to spend time there. I can't count the number of Christmases that have been ruined because he (and all of his similarly drunken, abusive, chain-smoking children) were spending the holidays extra drunk. I asked my mom frankly once if he had to get sober to keep her would he? She scoffed. He wouldn't. The whole thing makes me very sad.

In a detached kind of way I'm sorry for him. I'm sorry he's having to face cancer the way I'd be sorry for a stranger I'd heard about on the news or something. I'm sorry for my mom, sorry that she'll have to carry his burden. But I can't bring myself to feel broken-hearted or anything. In fact, I'll admit that I see this as an opportunity for my mom to get out from under this thing she got herself into... and I feel a little ashamed at myself for thinking things like "Well, maybe everyone would be better off...". If faced with attending a funeral I don't think I could even appear sad... just be there for my mom (like I was for their wedding in the first place) and support the family who do love and miss him. And, of course, we're getting way ahead of ourselves here in thinking of death and funerals anyway. Prostate cancer is quite treatable, if the stubborn old fool actually goes through with it (apparently "after he has a few toddies" he starts talking about how he's not going to let them cut him open, not going to go through treatment).

He's such a pitiable person, so unable to cope, so hopelessly addicted (and unwilling to change) that in my best moments I can only feel sorry for him, pity him. In my worst moments, I feel hope that he will die so his poisonous influence will just go away and I feel truly ashamed about that. I would love to believe that I'm a better person than that but I have to face up to the fact that the weakest and worst parts of me are, indeed, that bad. Tough stuff.

Labels: ,