no White Christmas this year!

A white Christmas is fairly rare here in Portland, and thank god for that.

We do not see very much snow here in the city – the mountains, over the last week, have gotten 24 inches or more, and the pass over the Siskyous on I-5 in southern Oregon was closed for hours the other day and might be again. US 26 and US 20 over the Cascades have been snowed over and occasionally closed this winter – the last week or two.

In 2008, I drove down to SoCal to see my brother and some relatives, and the Siskyous were snowed over on the way back then too, in January, but the road was sort of open, although snow-packed. I didn’t use the cable chains – can’t remember if I had them then or not. In the winter of 2010, I had the black Caliber and got it stuck on my friend’s street while having no trouble getting there. But, I pulled into my friend’s street, which had the full 8 inches of snow on it and bottomed the car out and got stuck. I don’t think the chains would have made much of s difference. Some yahoo in a 4×4 had rutted the road up terribly – an unpaved road past the creek, and some of those ruts were deep enough to have my car’s floor pan on the snow and the wheels above it. Took us three hours to get it the hundred yards back to the main road.

In 1998, in the spring, I had a car wreck on the Morrison Bridge and was severely messed up, and spent 59 days in the hospitals and almost eight months in an Adult Foster Care Home, from the middle of June until the end of January the next year. The Foster Home was way out in SE Portland, and I had a PO Box downtown, so I sometimes went there to get the mail. We had a white Christmas that year, snow in downtown Portland, and in 10 years, had another one in 2009, for me to get stuck in.

My GPS says I am at 78 feet above sea level; snow is rather rare down here. It falls sometimes – like this spring, when my friend from Japan was here – but it usually doesn’t stick. The winters were pretty hard in 04 and 05 too, but a white Christmas is rare in Portland.  They say we won’t have one this year – a 4% chance.

I don’t mind.  Snow is nice to look at, but sucks to live in.

*****