Snowed In

It's raining now and hopefully my parking lot will be clear by the morning so I can leave the immediate area.  Today I made a yummy soup - it was my first time using dried beans without a pressure cooker (cause I don't own one) so I was a bit nervous that the beans would be hard.  Thank goodness, cause the soup turned out well and I'd have hated to have to dig out all of the beans as I ate the soup.  (Ingredients:  Great Northern beans, spicy Italian sausage, chicken, pancetta, spinach, tomatoes, parmasean cheese, garlic, basil, pepper, parsley in a chicken broth that I served over crusty rosemary bread from Avenue Bread Company).  I don't think I'm afraid of dry beans any longer.

Tausha stayed the night a week ago.  A night.  We got to my place around 11 pm and left at 6:30 am.  Today I was cleaning up a bit and found this on the living room rug.  I thought it was some random piece of paper that I'd dropped.  It happens.

But when I turned it over I found that it was a test strip!  Here less than 8 hours and I've got the tell-tale sign that Tausha has been around.  When I moved from Boise we found test strips in random places in my apartment.  After I'd been here a few years I continued to find test strips in my car.  I remember Tara started keeping jars of test strips to use in an art piece.  I don't know if she ever got around to it, but those things are sure ubiquitous...so she still has time.  Love ya Taush!

Snowmageddon

It's been snowing since Sunday...well, the snow took a break for a while on Tuesday.  I was able to go to work for most of the day on Tuesday.  But Wednesday and today?  Crazy!  If I could get to the main road, I'm sure I'd be fine.  See? The roads are pretty clear.  No real ice, just dry slush.  But to get to the road I would have to leave my parking lot.  Which would be impossible.  All of the cars are frozen in place.  And the parking lot is covered in a foot of ice.

I ventured out to the grocery store today.  Not a lot of people out and about.  And the snow was crunchy.  As we don't tend to get snow here, there's not a lot one can do but wait until it melts.  Especially those of us on hills or on side streets.


The areas to the South and East of me don't have power.  I'm very glad that so far I still do.  When I first moved here I purchased a bunch of flashlights and lights but I've failed to check the batteries recently.  So fingers crossed that the power stays on.

My neighbor has a snowman on top of her bug.  It's super cute.  

Not a fan

Cranes...I don't like cranes.  The mechanical ones.  I see them and I start to get nervous.  I think they are going to fall on me.  They just don't seem stable.  It's not as bad as it used to be.  I used to hyperventilate when I saw them.  I'd ask my companions if we could change our route on the way to wherever we were going so as to avoid walking under or near a crane.

Snow in the Seattle area.  People here can't drive in the rain.  They slow to a crawl.  Can you imagine what they do in the snow?  They are completely inept.  I followed a lady down a hill that had an immediate uphill after the downhill.  She was going 10 miles per hour.  I told her that snow does not change the law of physics.  That she still needed momentum to get up the hill.  She, of course, didn't hear me and slid down the up hill.  Thank goodness I was no longer behind her, but beside her.  It snows an inch and I'm confined to where I can walk because I don't want to die and, more importantly, I don't want my car to get hurt.  I'd really like a change to be made to snow.  I'd like it to only snow on trees and grass and dirt.  I'd like snow to not fall on roads or sidewalks.  Country roads are o.k. I guess, mostly cause I very rarely drive on them.  Can someone get on making that happen?  Thank you ever so.

Sneezes, Hiccups and Coughs...Oh My!

So...due to it being Dr. Zhivago at my house and the airport shuttle company being fresh out of sled dogs, I had to hike down the hill in 2 feet of snow with all of my luggage to meet the shuttle van at the entrance to my apartment complex. The weight of my luggage practically pulled my down the hill once we hit the pure ice portion of it. When I spoke with the shuttle company about 14 hours before they were to pick me up, they told me that they could not pick me up due to their vans not being able to get up to where I lived. As much as I told the guy that my street wasn't "up" from anywhere and I'd be happy to meet them on the street, he wasn't going for it. Kept telling me I'd have to get to a hotel parking lot at 3 am for them to take me to the airport. So here's my question: If I had someone to take me to a random hotel parking lot at 3 am, I wouldn't very well need the shuttle company to take me to the airport, now would I?
The only way I could get them to take me to the airport was to agree to have them pick me up 7 hours before my flight took off. So I had the wonderful opportunity to sit on the floor outside airport security and go through my email for 4 1/2 hours. There were many people still stranded from the storms the days before. Lots of people taking naps on the floor, on chairs, anywhere they could.

Continued the Tara/Tausha tradition of going downtown for HoCho and a visit to the Capitol Christmas Tree. They are still doing contstruction on the Capitol building this year. Taush says it's never-ending construction. So instead of a tree on the Capitol steps we again get the large tree just across the street decorated. Same bulbs though. But no opportunity to ding-dong ditch the Liberty Bell replica.  Darn!

New Year's Eve we went tubing in Garden Valley. Six runs with turns and jumps. Two hours of great fun. Run number Six was supposedly pretty scary and dangerous, so I nixed that run and decided to go with run number Five, which I stupidly thought was less dangerous. I followed directions and drug my feet the entire way, went as slow as possible (which wasn't very slow) and went up the side of the run, my tube kept going and I fell on my right arm. I heard several cracks when I landed. Knew I was hurt pretty badly and was completely scared I had broken my back.

I thought that if I'd broken my back, I'd better stand up as quickly as possible. Why? I don't know. Perhaps I thought that if I stood up quickly enough my broken back wouldn't get the news that it was broken. I stood up so quickly that I had yet to catch my breath, what with the wind being completely knocked out of me. I had to bend over and try to breathe until my lungs filled back up. Which then hurt like the dickens. Deep breaths and movements involving my right side were extremely painful. I climbed back up the hill, went down the hill 2 more times and decided it hurt too much to keep tubing and took fotos. Over 300 of them. A lot of them of strangers. I couldn't tell if I knew the person as they came down the hill, until they got closer to me. I'm sure they were probably wondering, "Why is this strange girl taking fotos of me?" Oops.

Went to the Doctor and besides him saying "No more monkeys jumping on the bed!" He told me that I didn't have cracked ribs, but they were severely bruised. I got some Vicodin and muscle relaxers that didn't help as much as I thought they would. Serious pain, especially when I tried to move in bed. Ouch! Today I'm a bit better, not us much pain, thank goodness.

I happened to get this cute moment of my nephew and his wife on Christmas Day. It was actually a foto of my other nephew, the cute couple didn't know they were in the frame, and I didn't realize it until I'd loaded the fotos onto my computer. I love it.

It's Doctor Zhivago at my house...

So my musings the other day about how there wasn't THAT much snow and Washington just needed more plows? Mostly true. But then we got even MORE snow. And what Washingtonians

 need is a lesson on how to clear walkways. Above is the walkway leaving my apartment. This poor girl is trying to manuever a stroller through the 4 inch semi-packed snow that was never shoveled from our walkay. She ended up just picking it up and carrying it (no baby was on board).

What I'm trying to decide is which is worse? The next building over has their walkway mostly shoveled...but all to the end of the walkway, in a nice pile. It's like winter hurdles. Who can jump over that thing in heels?
I have no winter jacket and no snow shoes/boots. Seeing me walk down the street/sidewalk in my trainers is quite the site. I'm slip sliding away with each step. And if I move to the unshoveled sidewalk, I sink with every step. So the choices are either fall on my bum or get snow up my pants. It's great to have choices in all things.

Above you will see my shower curtain liner. It's a map of the world. And had been very handy the past few years. While showering I have been able to brush up on all the geography that changed since I was in school. Soviet Block countries and what not. It was in the shower one day that I learned that Burkina Faso is actually a country in Africa, not just a made up country on Alias.

Every few months I toss the liner in the washing machine with some bleach. This week, it turns out, South America was not too pleased to be cleaned (but let me tell you, it needs it! All that graffiti and random dog poop just needs to go away.). Argentina was sliced right in half and the Peruvian/Bolivian border has a huge hole in it. Sad...sad...sad...I was having such a love affair with South America, and this is what it does to me? Looks like a new shower liner is now on Ranee's Christmas list.

It's snowing and I'm peeling...

...and I don't ski. Argentina stays with me. (Until I stop peeling, that is.)

A few days ago it started snowing...little balls of snow. It looked like fake snow. There wasn't a lot of it, but certainly more than the people here are used to. Almost the entire office called in Snow Day. As I was driving to work I was completely astonished by just how bad the drivers were. Going so slow up a hill that there is no way they were ever going to make it. So they gave up, stopped the car, got out and walked away. Just left the car. Who does that?

The Seattle area doesn't get a lot of snow, so people aren't used to driving in it. And even with the threat of snow, people stay home. This road is usually back to back traffic and the shopping center is usually full of cars. The nice thing is that with people not travelling on the roads, the roads stay wintery and white. 

The unfortunate thing about the wintery roads and inexperienced winter drivers are accidents. A co-worker and I were walking down to the shopping center below and saw this big, gaping hole in the brick wall. You could see right into the restaurant's kitchen down below. If you look closely you can see a yellow/orange speck about 3 bricks above the hole. We decided a large white truck slid on the snow, jumped the curb and the sidewalk and ran into the wall and gave the Square Lotus (the restaurant) some instant ventilation. 

I've spent the weekend watching Holiday movies. I love the Fa La La La Lifetime and Hallmark movies. There's just a few basic premises to these movies, and there is little variance and no surprises. Completely predictible. But I love them. Some of them end up being very well done and bring tears to my eyes. Hooray for cheesy Holiday movies.

There's a storm expected tonight. The powers that know these things are warning of no electricity for the following week due to the gusts of wind. As long as the airport has electricity and can get me out of here and home on Wednesday, I'm happy.