Snow Stories to Share?
If you’re not from the Pacific Northwest, then maybe you haven’t heard about our bout of winter weather up here. This entire week has been insane… Check out what the news says about it:
SEATTLE (AP) — A monster Pacific Northwest storm coated the Seattle area in a thick layer of ice Thursday and brought much of the state to a standstill, sending hundreds of cars spinning out of control, temporarily shutting down the airport and knocking down so many trees that members of the Washington State Patrol brought chain saws to work.
Read more: Times Union . Com
And this:
250K without power in Wash. as flood worries rise
SEATTLE – A powerful Pacific Northwest storm knocked out power to about 250,000 electric customers around Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia after it coated much of Washington in ice
Read more: Fox News
Yep, John and I are among the 250k without power, but let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, John and I had to work from home. Since we don’t have internet yet, we had to work in the “Clubhouse” of our apartment complex which has free wifi! Last Friday, seeing the forcast, everyone at YMI checked out their work computers, so working from home wasn’t a problem.
The lighting was terrible, so John had a heck of a time getting a picture this clear… so here I am working and sorry for the blurriness.
So, the snow started out looking like this:
You can still see the tiles of the bricks on roof and the trees look mostly green with a dusting on top. This amount of snow was enough to close schools and close the YMI office.
Yep, then our apartment complex turned into this:
No more tiles visible. but the trees are holding up the snow well, and it’s snowy, not icy.
In this weather, John and I ventured out to run a few errands. We elected to walk because we saw a lot of people in their crappy cars attempting to drive around. Here I am all bundled up.
What this picture doesn’t show is my crappy, crappy shoes. I DON’T OWN ANY SNOW SHOES! or waterproof shoes of any kind, or boots that won’t soak up moisture like a sponge.
So, our trek out was fun for my feet. Where the snow was packed, I did just fine. But if we walked through unpacked snow, John had to walk in front of me, shuffling like a party rocker to pack down the snow for me.
On our way out, I took pictures of my poor truck which just got accosted by the snow.
And look at the load of snow in the bed…
This is an incredible amount of snow for our area. Normally an inch sends the area into a tizzy (because we don’t have tons of snow plows/ we get a lot of ice since the temperature hovers around freezing/ and our region is very hilly), but this is just insane.
Then, John and I headed out of our apartment complex.
Our errands included getting some food, mailing some letters at the UPS store and picking up a Redbox movie. The Redbox caused us some heartache the next day. Freezing rain had coated the road, so when we went to return the dvd, it got a little dicey, especially since we got halfway there and realized that we forgot the DVD. And when a car attempted to back into us. and when my shoes got totally soaked in slush.
Anyway, here’s John at the intersection…
And me! Ignore the mascara spot… You cannot tell from these pictures, but it was sleeting on us which made my make-up run.
You can see a little bit the water droplets on my coat and scarf. That sleet turned into freezing rain.
The next day, Thursday, we woke up to icicles coating EVERYTHING. I took pictures of our tree which had branches coated with ice.
And it got worse throughout the day. Then, we lost power. After 5 hours without power, we abandoned our apartment and fought our way down the icy freeway, to my sister’s house who still had power.
So that’s how things are now… Luckily the ice is melting today and we hope to have power when we get home from work!
How about you? Any snow adventure to tell? Anyone forced to take refuge away from home? Any cool picture of the ice?
Like this:
Posted on January 20, 2012, in Life and tagged Christian, ice, Life, Ministry, pacific northwest, snow, storm, winter, Youth Missions International. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Wow. You guys had it much worse than we did up here on the peninsula. We got 3″ of snow on Wednesday and another inch and a half yesterday. No ice. Dave took the Subaru to work this week instead of his Civic. The Civic just hides under its snow blanket when we get this kind of weather. It’s kinda like Rose’s shoes in snow. Now we just have 3-4″ of slushy snow all over the place. Makes for rather dicey driving because its so slippery. The main roads are just fine though. I’m glad you two were able to make it safely down to Brian and Ranelle’s. You may have a fridge/freezer full of spoiled food though from the power outage. Take care!
Yeah, it was bad. The thing that John was most upset about probably going bad was the thing of ice cream we just bought… otherwise, we didn’t have too much food in the fridge to go bad.
i like your scarf.
hope your shoes dried out ok!! i know it is not fun to have wet shoes! we walked to the store a few times also, which was interesting b/c they didn’t have power!
Thanks! Ranelle got me the scarf in Ireland! Yeah, it was interesting to us because we had no power, but all the stores right next to our apartments had power… I really liked the pic you put up of your fence on facebook!