weather

Snow Problem At All

February 13, 2019 by Kathryn

My kids and I are Canadians real bad and we crave the snow. We’re not Canadians enough to, you know, actually live in Canada or even to have watched a complete hockey game in the past six months. But we are Canadian enough to eat poutine, to wear toques, and to think we know how to drive in the snow.

Except for Wanda.

She is nine and her snow-driving skills are sub-par.

But we live in the Pacific Northwest, where our closeness to salty water and mountains strands us in a sea of grey almost-snow all winter long. Some years we get nary a flake. And we mourn so hard.

This year the Farmer’s Almanac predicted a wet and mild winter and we made peace with our snowlessness. But then the weather channel app started messing with us.

10% chance of frozen joy sprinkles.

30% chance.

JK rain.

And then:

100% CHANCE OF SNOW!!!

But we didn’t believe it. They’ve burned us before. When it finally fell, we were so excited.

We expected an inch or two and that was enough to make us crazy with joy.

We got snow. We got more snow. We got freezing temperatures.

Over TWO FEET of snow fell in about a week in a place where school will be canceled if a rumor circulates that half an inch of snow sent Seattle a spam email once.

School was canceled.

We didn’t get in any driving practice for Laylee’s impending driver’s test. She didn’t feel up to practicing her parallel parking.

We played a Catan mega game and no one even cried.

We drank hot chocolate by the gallon and made cinnamon rolls and did puzzles and burned half an Ent in our fireplace.

The kids made snow men and snow poffs.

Our power went out Monday night and Dan and I got up at 4am to start the generator. And restore heat and refrigerator power. When he went to pull the cord, this happened.

We spent over an hour repairing the pull cord multiple times (it kept breaking) and trying again and again to start the generator. Then we said a prayer. And tried again. And it worked on the first pull!

So we had heat and refrigeration and Minecraft. We were hooked up! And the snow kept falling, even as the temperatures warmed up.

At one point our two-story vaulted metal roof got melty enough that it roof-alanched all of its snow in one massive 5-foot-tall hard-packed mound at the side of the house.

So, of course, they sculpted a sled ramp that ran from the side of the house all the way down and through the forest owned by our neighbor.

There are benefits that come from allowing your fence to be reclaimed by the moss and slugs of the pacific northwest. Those benefits include turning your yard into a deer highway and having easy access to sled-trespass on your neighbor’s property during Snowmageddon.

A couple other Snowpocalypse highlights were:

Dan working from home

hauling wood for the fire using the kids’ sleds in the middle of the night

watching Dan zoom out of our driveway to go help a friend and leave an 11-inch-deep tire tread in the snow

eating “snow” cones at our awesome neighbor’s house next to a driveway campfire

using my thermal cooker when the power was out

reading by the fire as a family

There will be consequences for this week. The kids have already missed five days of school and had one late start and they’re still home until more of the snow melts. Those days will have to be made up at the end of the year. This is going to wreak havoc with summer plans and youth conference schedules.

The trampoline looks unnaturally stretched and the back deck is suffering under the weight of several inches of unmelted snow.

These are just the consequences for our family and they’re pretty minor. I know other people have suffered much more being stuck and cold and injured on the roads and hungry. I feel terrible for them and we’ve prayed every night that people would be safe and we’ve offered to help where we could.

But, there is nothing our being stressed or anxious or mad will do to change the snow or keep people safe or make the school year any shorter. It will just make us miserable.

So, we choose to celebrate it. It’s been a fat party for a week and a half and we have made amazing memories. Thank you, Mother Elsa. We have LOVED the freeze!

Hot Heat

July 14, 2014 by Kathryn

It is stinkin’ hot here!

Ahem.

“forseattle,” she coughs into her hand.

In the Seattle area, we tend to worship the sun until we actually feel the sun and then we shrink and hide from it and ask each other “Why, why, WHY?!” while crying and dumping slurpees on our faces. When temperatures rise above 75, heat-induced whining takes over. Above 75 in Seattle is like below 65 in southern California. DISASTER!

It’s been in the high 80s the past several days and we don’t have AC and it just makes you want to start a nudist colony in a field of naturally-occurring free range ice cubes.

Unless you are my kids.

If you are my kids, you get home from church on Sunday and change into your fleece Christmas jammies before heading to choir.

When I asked Magoo WHY HE WOULD DO SUCH A THING, while I mopped my melting flesh up off the sidewalk, he said, “I wore these so I wouldn’t have to use a blanket.”

What the what?! It is a BILLION DEGREES OUTSIDE. BLANKETS ARE NOT REQUIRED.

In other news, we are having fun jumping on the trampoline with all the ice from the freezer. We also get to spend lots of time in our air conditioned car because hot dry season also means it’s time to slap down all new roads. Everywhere. At the same time.

Today we were driving to swimming lessons and Wanda shrieked, “MOM! MOM! It’s an INSTRUCTION PINECONE!”

You know? Those bright orange pinecones, used by instruction workers when they’re doing the yearly road changing.

I did not correct her.

A Partial List of Things It’s Harder to Do When the Sun is Out in Seattle

February 28, 2014 by Kathryn

1. Back out of my long driveway
2. Use my tablet outdoors
3. Deny the mountains exist
4. Conceal the fact that I am 86.5% of the way through my transition to becoming a PNW vampire
5. Yell at my kids
6. Hide under the covers all day
7. Control my maniacal laughter
8. Remember to do anything productive
9. Open the blinds fast enough
10. Consider ever leaving this Garden of Eden

Alright With the Rain

May 13, 2013 by Kathryn

We were enduring a typical Pacific Northwest underwater baseball practice the other day. I was hunched under my giant umbrella, wearing a slicker, sitting on my Tommy Bahama chair. Wanda, on the other hand, was running around like a maniac through the field, kicking a ball, getting soaked and loving it.

She pulled down the hat on the slicker and just let the rain run off her skin.

“Do you wanna come sit with Mamma?” I asked.

“Mo-om!” she answered, “It’s okay. I’m alright with the rain.”

Sometimes I’m alright with the rain too. Sometimes I can be surrounded by all the junk that’s out there in the world and think, This will pass. I’ll just let it roll off my back. I’m alright with the rain.

Other times, I’m hunched down in a parka with my umbrella, afraid to leave my house, afraid to turn on the TV or Facebook because I just don’t want to hear one more depressing news story. Everything feels too personal. If it happened to her, it might as well have happened to me. I get mired in the false belief that the world is a scary place, that there’s more bad then good.

A friend recently reminded me that the news doesn’t report every time a plane lands. It only reports the crashes. For every hateful or fearful political post on Facebook, there are a billion acts of kindness that slip quietly by. The reality of my life is pretty blissful, if I can learn to be alright with the rain in my periphery, if I can make my heart understand the differences between the things I can change and the things I can’t.

A few days after the baseball practice, Wanda and I were driving in the Swagger Wagon. Suddenly the rain was not okay.

“Mom,” she cried, “There’s rain all over the windows!”

“It’s okay,” I told her, thinking, We live in Seattle. What else is new?

“It’s making me nervous! I don’t like it.”

“The wipers keep the windshield clean so we can see where we’re going.”

“But there’s rain here and here and here,” she said, pointing at the side windows and parts of the windshield the wipers couldn’t touch.

“But the wipers clear off just enough that I can drive safely and get us where we need to go. It’s gonna be okay.”

“But I want all the rain to go away.”

“Well that’s not going to happen until the sun comes out.”

“When is the sun coming?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Sweets. I don’t know. But for now we’ll be fine.”

I truly don’t know when ALL the rain will go away or when the sun will come but I do know it will and until it does, I know that enough of the rain will be cleared away. I can see enough to get where I need to go. And, we’re doing just fine.

How Dare They?

December 20, 2012 by Kathryn

I have a special relationship with snow. I grew up in Canada with more snow than most sane people can handle. And I loved it. I love the smell of snow, the look of snow, snow games and snow treats. I love building things with snow and getting frozen solid, because when you’re frozen solid, you need cocoa to thaw you out.

My current morning alarm tone is the song “Let it Snow!” and every single morning when I hear it, my heart skips a beat excitedly, and then I feel let down and musically lied to. Of course it’s not snowing. It almost never snows here.

I know I’m not unique. Nearly everyone dreams of a White Christmas. I’m certainly not the only one in my family who loves snow. My kids love it so much that they become enraged whenever it doesn’t snow. That’s a lot of days of rage, living in the rain capital of the US.

As much as Magoo loves snow, he hates those who would seek to destroy it.

“You know who are the worst people ever?”

People who don’t let your newly potty trained 3-year-old cut in line at a public restroom? I think. Voldemort?

“It’s those guys who come through with those awful SNOW DOZERS and steal all the snow. I can’t stand those guys.”

“You mean, the city workers who drive the plows to clear the roads so people can drive after a storm?”

“Yeah. Those guys are the worst.” He shakes his head with disgust.

They are pretty nasty. It’s as though they don’t even like fun. Or joy. Or the laughter of children. I bet if you looked deep into their eyes, you’d find nothing but a cheerless void. And then you’d turn to stone. Never to drink hot cocoa again.

I would like to add them to our list of local villains. This list already includes:

1. Firefighters, the guys who steal all the fire from our houses. These clowns are so bad, they even go out of their way to prevent fires from happening in the first place.

2. Waste “management.”

3. The city maintenance workers who slash and destroy all the delicious blackberry vines that grow across the sidewalks.

4. Chiropractors. Don’t even get me started on chiropractors.

It Starts

October 6, 2010 by Kathryn

I saw my breath when I took the kids to the bus this morning.

My name is Kathryn Thompson and I do not approve this message.

I Can See Clearly Now and the Rain is Gone But It Will Be Back RE: I Live in the Seattle Area

February 21, 2010 by Kathryn

It seems that everyone who lives within a 500 mile radius of Seattle just says they’re from Seattle to save time. I sort of fall into that category. Our plays, concerts, zoos, museums and company parties are in Seattle but our home is outside the city, a ways outside. We live where things are a bit cheaper and there’s more room to breathe but we still share the same clouds and beautiful green vegetative greenness.

The past couple of weeks we’ve seen much more sunshine than is normal. Cherry trees are blossoming. Stars have even been visible at night. I’ve had to dig out my sunglasses a couple of times and Wanda’s skin sparkles like diamonds when we go outside. It’s her first exposure to sunlight since birth and we’re starting to wonder about her…

As much as I love the sunshine, I’m suspicious of it. Why is it sunny? Is the frost going to kill all the flowers? Are we about to have a major “weather event”? Does this mean it’s going to rain all summer? Perhaps Al Gore is behind this. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to see it clearly because I am the proud owner of a new pair of glasses.

I recently went in to have my eyes checked. It turns out it’s been a few years since I’ve been to the eye doctor and some things have changed, things like clothing styles and my vision.

I went to Lens Crafters, which I am convinced is a vortex not unlike the Bermuda Triangle. When we walk into that store my electronic devices stop working completely and Wanda poops through whatever she’s wearing. We tried this twice in one day and it happened both times.

The doctor asked me to look at some things. Lights blinked. I showed my peripheral vision prowess. Someone blew a puff of air in my pupils. She asked me how often I wore my current glasses. I told her that I wore them if they looked cute with my outfit or if it would benefit me to look studious at the moment. She laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

When she asked me to read the lowest line of clear letters from the eye-doctor-getting-smaller-letter-card-thing, I started to rub my eyes.

“Things are a bit blurry,” I said, “I think I have some sleep in my eyes. Just let me get this, um, sleep out of my eyes and I’ll tell you which line I can read.”

The truth was that it was 11am and I’d been awake for several hours but I could not believe that I could not see the bottom few lines. I could always see all the lines. I kept rubbing the strange goo that seemed to be blocking my vision. The doctor suggested we try out some lenses so she brought out the crazy goo-goo goggles and started in with the, “Which looks better, one or two, and one or two, and now one… or two?”

After doing this for a while I found that things suddenly began to look clear, too clear, strangely, freakishly, stop-saving-for-the-HDTV-because-now-the-whole-world’s-HD clear. My vision is not that bad but the glasses really make a difference and I’m shocked at how long I let it go like that, not realizing that I couldn’t see as well as I should be able to.

For the next few days, I walked around lifting the glasses up and dropping them back down and smiling. Dan would say, “Do they still work?” They DO! There are so many things that I’ve discovered are supposed to have crisp edges to them, road signs that are legible way sooner than I thought. Seeing = fun. Hopefully they go with every outfit because as long as I can manage to remember them, I’ll have these babies on a lot.

Windows Down – Zune Playlist

April 14, 2009 by Kathryn

I’m dreaming, hoping, wishing for summer. I can’t wait to drive my car with the windows rolled down, my hair slamming into my face and whipping my eyes until I’m forced to pull it back into a matted ponytail, while the children yell things to me and I yell back, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

We’re not quite there yet but I’m preparing in every way I can.

We pulled the weather sealant from the windows so they’ll open again. I keep washing the kids’ winter coats “for the last time” only to have frigid weather return. I squint frequently at the chalky gray sky, searching for signs of sun.

Most importantly, I’ve put together a playlist for my Zune full of songs to play with the windows rolled down. When I told Eve it was time to create a “windows down” playlist for her MP3 player of the questionable “fruity” variety, she suggested that songs on this list should be ones that are fun to drive to but also not embarrassing to be listening to as other people will hear them when we’re stopped at a light.

I disagree here because although I don’t know about her MP3 player, my Zune has a “send” button, which I could employ when I’m slowing down at a light if, say, my junior high nemesis is standing on the street corner waiting to cross as I pull up to the intersection. I’m covered.

So here’s my current Windows Down Zune Playlist:

Learning to Fly by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — Classic, best Tom Petty song of all time, regardless of what Tom Cruise thinks.

What a Feeling by Irene Cara — Get your Flashdance on with this little baby. My kids also LOVE it.

Under Pressure by My Chemical Romance — a slightly harder rock version of the original. Very nice.

Life is a Highway by Rascal Flats — Forget that it’s the McQueen song, this is just a great driving tune, much better than the 1991 Tom Cochrane version.

Two of Hearts by Stacey Q — I think this song originated as the soundtrack for a commercial but I will forever think of it as the song Tootie was going to sing and dance to on The Facts of Life for her big Broadway audition before she totally chickened out.

Cruisin’ by Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow

Can’t Stop This Thing We’ve Started by Bryan Adams — Definitely most drivable Bryan Adams and he has to be included since he was my first rock concert.

Bruises by Chairlift

St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion) by John Parr — You may want to get out of the car and start running while listening to this but you must control yourself, especially if there are children in the car.

Lovefool by The Cardigans — Sophomore year of college in a single song

Baby I Love Your Way by Big Mountain

Eye of the Tiger by Survivor — This will likely show up on every playlist I publish. You can’t really go wrong with The Eye.

Just like Heaven by The Cure

Cowboy Take Me Away by Dixie Chicks

More Than a Feeling by Boston — My dad and summer vacation road trips in a bottle. He was not ashamed to roll the windows down and blast it. I remember blasting this song out of our mini-van while waiting in line for a Ferry to Victoria one summer.

Kokomo by The Beach Boys — Inviting the warm winds

Forever by Chris Brown — This one works for both cars and spaceships

Miss You Much by Janet Jackson

Viva La Vida by Coldplay

Come Go With Me by The Beach Boys

Roam by B-52s — Roam all you want. Just stay in your own lane.

The Way You Make Me Feel by Michael Jackson

Fly Away or American Woman by Lenny Kravitz — For some reason neither is available on playlist.com.

Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

I Plead Insanity by Belinda Carlisle

Feeling Good by Michael Buble

Hold the Line by Toto

Suddenly I See by K.T. Tunstall

Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer

If you’re planning on buying any of the songs here, stop supporting proprietary digital formats and buy from the Zune site. They’ll work on ANY device, including those of the fruity varieties. Your software will suck up any songs purchased on Zune and transfer them over.

Any songs I’m blatantly missing?

Still Here

January 9, 2009 by Kathryn

So we’re experiencing the worst flooding here in ~90 years and our town is cut off in every direction from the rest of the world. Dan made it home before the flooding and our house is up high enough that we always fare okay. There’s just no new mail, no garbage pickup, no grocery deliveries to the stores and no easy access to hospital care. So many people have lost their homes throughout the state and as the waters recede, there is damage to our major routes out of town, so it may be several days until people can get in or out safely.

Luckily Dan is stuck on this side of the water and is able to work from home fairly effectively. And although Laylee thinks she’s broken her leg and is begging me to take her to Children’s Hospital for X-rays, I’m fairly certain that the Arnica I just rubbed on it has done the trick. With the way she’s prancing around the living room, I think I’ll hold off on calling the fire station emergency evac boats into immediate action.

Click over to Parenting to read about the REAL secret of how we’re handling the whole situation. Parental wisdom comes from surprising sources. It’s humorous and highly useful information to enrich your life.

Uphill Both Ways

December 27, 2008 by Kathryn

I have a post up at Parenting today about our experiences being snowed in for Christmas. I submitted the post a couple of days before the 25th so it does not include our experience of waking up Christmas morning to a cold house with no power. Luckily Dan had wired our generator into the house electrical system a couple of weeks previous so he was able to get the heater and fridge running and the tree lit within a matter of minutes and we carried on with Christmas without any real inconvenience. The only way you could tell that anything had happened was by the smug look of satisfaction on Dan’s face at his amazing manly handiwork. Like the Kung Fu Panda, he asserts that “There is no charge for awesomeness.”

There may not be a charge for it but there’s certainly a payoff. I note down all awesomeness in my special Book of Awesomeness and it will all be rewarded most generously.

So, the snow. The snow is deep and bounteous. We live in a suburb of Seattle, a suburb that is apparently a vortex of weather magnification. If Seattle gets 3 inches, we get 10. If Seattle has a lot of rain, we get a flood. I don’t even want to know what happens to us when Seattle eventually gets its earthquake. Perhaps we’ll get the fast elevator down to the core of the earth where Jules Verne and all the cave people live. Perhaps I’ll be made a queen there.

Our city is really hilly and I think the county has 1.5 working snow plows which refuse to come down our street because it’s too steep. USPS, UPS and FedEx all agree as does Waste Management. We’re going on our third week with no trash pickup and it’s been over a week since any mail was delivered. Today I walked the kids to a play date through snow that was well above my knees in places. Yes. They cried. Many of tears. After about 2 hours of work on the second or third day of snow, we were able to get one of our cars to the top of our hill but have been too scared to drive anywhere. Apparently the tire chains we’ve so proudly carried with us on winter mountain journeys for the last several years do not fit either of our cars. At all. We sort of assumed they were one size fits all. They are not.

The major road that connects us with the shops and services in town has been closed for several days so when I went to town on Tuesday to pick up some groceries and mail some Ebay packages that just happened to sell right in the middle of the biggest snow event we’ve had in the past 6 years, I had to get creative. Stephanie and I loaded our packages in the laundry basket my kids had been using as a sled, hooked up a bungee cord and pulled them the half mile down the hill into town. About halfway down we met up with some teenagers snowboarding who suggested that we take the packages out of the basket and ride down.

Who am I to say no to a bunch of hooligans with blurred-out faces snowboarding down a major automotive throughway?

After the post office, we had lunch at a favorite little Thai restaurant. The owner asked us if we’d been in before and when we said we had, she squinted up her eyes, crossed her arms and said, “Hmph. I never see you before…” Apparently she had her doubts but she made us some yummy food that I did not have to cook within the ever shrinking 4 walls of my snow fortress, so I forgave her for the suspicious interrogation.

At lunch I told Stephanie that there was something kind of fun in all the cold and cabin fever and lack of Christmas packages arriving. I told her about how my sisters and I would pretend we were Laura Ingalls Wilder and her posse and that we were freezing in the wilderness. It wasn’t hard since I grew up in Canada and all winter long we were one tragic misstep away from actually freezing in the wilderness. We called the game Freezing in the Wilderness due to its aforementioned subject matter. Stephanie shook her head and laughed at me just a bit. Apparently she did not engage in that type of play.

We stopped at the grocery store for rations, loaded up our laundry basket sled and headed home. About halfway up the steep hill, we noticed a large burly man walking directly towards us. He was well over 6-feet tall with a bushy mustache and wasn’t veering to the side. Neither were we. It was strange, this chicken-like approach in the snowy deserted street. After a few moments a truck drove by, heading down the hill, having bypassed the Road Closure signs. The large man stopped walking a few feet in front of Stephanie and me with a perturbed look on his face.

“Great!” he exclaimed, “That truck just ruined my Laura Ingalls Wilder moment. Here I was walking through this peaceful snowy landscape and that guy has to drive by.”

I just stared at him as he continued on. So it’s not just little Canadian girls who play that game in their bunk beds on winter nights. Good to know I’m not alone.