I’m here in Portland, and there’s well over a foot of snow outside my door. When I went out to stock up on supplies at the local market earlier, I saw people trampling around on skis and snowshoes. Midwesterners might find our predicament laughable, but this is the worst snowstorm that Portland’s had in about 30 years, apparently.
I was originally planning on flying down to California two days ago to spend Christmas with my folks…Now I’ll be lucky if I make it out the night of the 24th…
Wish me luck getting out. Hope all the rest of you with travel plans are able to make it home safely, too.
I think that I was surveying during that part of the 70’s! I remember finding fresh bear scat half way up a mountain…we continued, however, we were very loud.
There’s 8 inches or so of snow here in Vancouver, with more on the way. That’s more snow than I’ve seen in the 5ish years since I moved here, in total. However, I spent the first four decades of my life dealing with this amount of routinely, and I haven’t fogotten how. In Montreal, getting 6-9 new inches (of snow!) overnight was a routine event.
What this weather did do, however, was demonstrate the inadequacy of Vancouver plumbing building codes: water lines have been freezing all over town, including at my place for 36 hours of so. Luckily, there were no broken pipes as a result. My place has runs of pipe that would never get made anywhere else in Canada.
It snowed all last night, about 8", but then turned to drizzle about 5 this morning, so that the snow weighted a ton. It took me about 5 hours to finally get most of it cleared away. I was just too pooped to do more than clear a slim path on the public sidewalk. Now it is pouring rain, and is supposed to turn so mild this weekend as to melt everything, so we’ll have to deal with flooding.
It’s been quite a ride this year, with winter snowfall starting in the middle of November. Maybe that’s the worst of it. Maybe that was just a warning shot.
Poking my head out of the snow in Spokane - where we have officially set a new record for the snowiest December since records have been kept. It’s snowed every day for the past week. It’s still snowing. It’s going to snow until at least tomorrow afternoon. It’s going to snow again this weekend. And winter has only just started!
It’s going to be a long time before we can take down the Christmas lights, because the lights on the lower part of the tree out front and extension cords are buried under almost 3 feet of snow. The piles where we’ve thrown the snow we shoveled off the sidewalk and driveway are over 5 feet high. It took the city 5 days to get around to plowing my street from last week’s snowfall.
The mayor has declared a state of emergency.
Yes, it usually snows in Spokane during the winter. But it usually only snows 3 to 4 inches at a time with a break in between. This has just been outlandish.
I really dislike snow. If our daughter was through with high school, if my husband didn’t have his own business here, and if his mother didn’t live here, I’d really be pushing to move someplace warmer.
sux doesn’t it! 
