surprise!

 

 

 I watched the Noon news yesterday and they were predicting RAIN later in the day and MAYBE some snow flakes above 1000 feet.

I was sitting here at my desk, the vertical blinds turned to keep the direct light out, at 2:30, when the phone rang.  It was my friend A, telling me that I should look out the window – and then come over.  Huh?  I got up, rotated the blinds and waa laa, it’s freakin’ snowin’!

Alright!

Second year of snow in a row here, second year in a row of having a new car to drive in it.  (last year when it snowed I had the blue 5-speed Caliber)

See, at this time, snow was falling but it wasn’t sticking.  People were driving like idiots anyway.  (C’mon!  There isn’t any black ice out yet, doofus)

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It’s about ten miles east to A’s house, but it took forever, because people looked out the office windows and fled home, clogging the streets.  The snow fell steadily as I inched along.  The 20 minute drive took an hour.

Sheesh.

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When I got to A’s out on Johnson Creek (it flows from Mt. Hood to the Willamette River at Milwaukie – it goes past my apartment building too) his street looked like this:

See?  Light snow, no problem … except it kept snowing.

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Looking back to Foster Road: not too bad.  Yet.

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Johnson Creek behind A’s house looked like this:

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Rain my ass; it kept snowing.  The Foster Road "freeway" made an early appearance as people fled east to home from work; I stayed at A’s house.  It kept snowing.

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The neighbor’s house and proof that you can take an unfocused shot with a digital camera.  (I’ve been playing with the camera controls)

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<img border="4" alt="got a n

ew jacket for Christmas” src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v155/NorthwesternCat/pics%20for%20OD%207/7a/DSCN9714Small.jpg&#8221; />

A perfect excuse to use my new winter jacket (got it for Christmas from my cousin and his wife)  and the self-shot …

(and just that morning I was thinking of going clean-shaven – too much white in the beard nowadays…)

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and my Sorel boots – 19 or 20 years old and getting more use in the last few years than most of the time I’ve owned them:

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In the summer that BBQ gets a lot of use.  For A’s birthday, I backed my Caliber into the driveway, opened the back dooors of the car, swung down the speakers on the lift back, and cranked my 458-watt stereo – rocked that party right.

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I hung out at A’s house for a few hours and then left, scheming a route that had few hills on it.  The hill Woodstock rides down past Reed College was blocked by a bus and cars backed up behind it… so I decided to turn around… on the steepest part of the hill, and go another way.

Noooope.  No traction.  Oooops.

But hey, no problem, I never did use the cable chains last year but had ’em in the car.  There was not much traffic on the road (ok, maybe people were smarter than I was…) so I got the chains out (I practised putting them on the car this summer), put ’em on, and drove back up the hill, no problems.

 

Well, hadda stop down the road to secure the ends of the cables hitting the car, and since some asshole was tailgating me on Johnson Creek Blvd, I turned down 32nd instead of continuing down the hill and over the railroad and onto Tacoma, crossing McLouglin … and it tuned out that that was a PRIME move, because traffic was backed up on McLouglin AND my street, 17th going south.  North?  Empty.  I got home, no problem, sure footed traction all the way, and those cars on southbound 17th sat there for HOURS – the 11 o’clock news that night said some people had five hour commutes!

A little after I got home it began raining and the temps went up.  I left the chains on and went out on my neighborhood streets just to drive my car with chains on it in sno and slush to get used to it (it handles them fine, thank you).  Now, the next day, it’s not feezing and the cars are hissing by on 17th – I should probably go take the chains off Black Cali.

I don’t HAVE to go anywhere.

Surprise snow?

No problem if it does.

 

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