Last one this weekend

Yes, well, there might be some doubt about that – "last one?" but it really is, because it’s after bed time and I have to get up at 5:20 in the morning and go back to the school bus driving job.

The weather report may have overstated the chance of snow, but the online prediction was right on.  It said "downpours" for Sunday, and it basically hasn’t stopped raining since mid-night last night.  Put another way, it has rained all fuckin’ day, and no gentle typical Portland rain either, it has been steady damn rain all day and so far all night.

There is another storm on the horizon too, and this one will pack high winds even here in the valley.  The prediction for the coast is for winds of Hurricane force; several communites there are bracing for the storm which will make landfall tonight at midnight-ish.  Cape Mears on the Oregon coast recorded a gust of 109 mph – 170 kph+ for you metric readers.  That, my friends, is a high wind.

The winds here in the Willamette Valley are predicted to gust up to 60 mph (100 kph) tomorrow.  That, and heavy rains are like, the perfect school bus driving weather.  (Sarcasm, anyone?)  The winds have been blowing from the southwest most of the day, and since my apartment faces that way, water has been seeping under my sliding glass door on the balcony; if I step near the window without shoes on, my socks get wet.  The linoleum has water under it now, and if I step on certain tiles near the window, water comes up from under the tiles.

Oh joy.

I know it can be worse – a few times in the nearly nine years I’ve lived here, I’ve had to lay towels by the slider to soak up the water.  Eventually, my slider is supposed to be replaced with a new window unit, but since they started on the second floor (first floor of apartments in this building) it will be next year before I get mine.

Today has been one of those take it easy days for me; I won’t have a day off again until December 24th.  I did a batch of laundry this evening and went to BiMart and spent some serious (for me) money, which I may regret, but I have stuff to make sandwiches out of the bread in the freezer and I bought a new chamois shirt to ward off the chill.  It isn’t THAT cold out, but with the rain and the wind, all insulation helps, and since the bus driving job isn’t nearly as strenuous as the newspaper job, I’ll need all the warmth I can get.  That bus is COLD before I get going on my routes tomorrow.

I foresee wearing my rainsuit tomorrow too; I wore it last night for the deliveries too.  I’ll have some outside time while I pre-trip my bus in the morning, so it’s good to be as water-proof as I can be.  Blacky Cat has shown almost no inclination to go out on the balcony – he was curious earlier but when I opened the slider for him, rain came in and got him and he RAN from the door, looking at me in a way that I saw as accusational – "why did you do that!?"

I tell him that other cats LIVE out in the weather and that he should be grateful that he has shelter like the apartment and a handy slave to put food and water in his dishes, but I don’t know if he believes me – he’s been an indoor cat all his life.

I was looking through my photobucket account earlier and I think I’ll be able to do themed pics a day entries.  The Navy; flowers; the view from my balcony; Johnson Creek by A & J’s house; buses; Crater Lake (does anyone object to more Crater Lake pics?  Between K* and I, we took over a thousand pics in the week we had the rental car this last summer; several hundred are of Crater Lake) and other themes.

Heck, there’s many pics of Japan and France that K* and her sister took; I can post those too, can’t I?

And I won’t forget the Gorge – got days of pics from there alone.  Hmm.  Multnomah Falls in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter?  I can do that too.

And ya know, I have this "new" scanner that I bought last December which I have hardly used and BOXES of prints to scan.  3478 pics on PB takes up just 17% of the space I have there to use – for Christmas break, I intend to do some scanning.

A note called me "Prolific".  Had something to do with 63 entries for the month of November.  Is prolific a bad thing?  Yeah, perhaps of sign of a guy with not much of a life offline, but then again, what would you look at online if not my pictures?

No inflated ego here, is there.

Heh.

*****