Well, this has been a record breaking month.  We have nearly the wettest month in history (missing it so far by less than a half an inch of rain) and now we have most of the city paralyzed with snow.

Microsoft's campus is virtually shut down.  I'm working from home as are most other folks.  State Route 512 - my first stretch of highway - was closed this morning due to excessive ice.  State Route 167 - my second stretch of highway was all but blocked by slow moving vehicles and abandoned cars from last night.

The highway patrol was urging people to only drive when absolutely necessary - so I rolled back into the bed for an hour! :-)

Here are a couple of grainy cell-phone pics from my back yard...

The only one that's been out there yet has been Daisy - and she is having a BLAST! :-)  She hasn't stopped running for the last 15 minutes since I let her out.

I have to venture out to get some gas for the Jeep today - but other than that, I think I'll just lay low and try to catch up on some paperwork for the office today.

I've also got a splitting headache... It seems that something in the storm isn't agreeing with my sinuses.  Maybe I'm allergic to snow...

Stay tuned - more to come...

Now we're getting SNOW! :-(  This is not the part of the country you want to live in to have snow.  Folks here can't drive in sunny weather, let alone snow.

My typical commute of an hour and a half took over four hours...Yep - you read that right... FOUR hours to get home today.  I did take the Jeep, which tends to make it a little longer, but this was unheard of.

The road was a solid sheet of ice in many places.  There were tractor-trailers and buses jackknifed all over the roadways.  Some folks were in the traffic for up to six hours as these accidents closed or blocked specific sections of the roadway.

I didn't have a good camera with me (in fact, we gave Rebecca ours and are looking for a deal on a decent digital camera on the cheap now) but I took a couple of pictures with my phone while I sat in traffic - which was gridlocked - outside my building.  It literally took me the better part of an hour to move 200 yards past my building...

You can't really tell from the pictures, but there literally is about two to three inches - max - of snow on the ground.  The problem was that the temperature began to plummet very quickly from around 40 to below freezing in a matter of a few hours.  This caused all of the we street surfaces to be covered with ice as the water from the rain / snow from earlier in the day froze.  This, coupled with people who are not used to driving in bad weather, made the streets impassable.

I'm planning on trying to head in to the office tomorrow - even though I didn't get home until after 10:00 tonight - but if the roads and traffic conditions haven't improved, I'll likely work from home.

Stay tuned - more to come...

Well, another holiday over and Rebecca is back at WSU.  I drove her and two of her friends there today.  The weather was great on the way out with two exceptions: Snoqualmie Pass and Pullman!

The pass was okay, but a had a speed limit of 45.  A lot of cars were going REALLY slow, even though the road a little slushy and wet.  I spent the rest of the drive chasing a storm... I finally caught up to it in Pullman.  We wound up with a nice dusting within about 15 minutes.

While we were waiting to make a turn, I was reminded of how glad I was to have lived in Pittsburgh if for nothing more than winter driving practice! :-)  The only other car on the road bounced off a curb after locking up his brakes coming down a hill.  Luckily the rest of his trip (that we saw, anyway) seemed a bit less eventful - although he still thought that "More Power!" would solve his problems...he was wrong... :-P

The trip back, though uneventful for me, was not as pleasant.  First, I left my Becky-Boo behind <sniff> and second, I must have seen more than a dozen cars that had slid off the road between Pullman and Colfax.  Sheriff's Deputies were on the scene of several and appeared to be making the rounds to the various scenes.  I just slipped the Jeep into 4WD and took it easy.  There was one moment of concern (while passing a Sheriff that had pulled over) where the rear-end broke loose - 4WD fixed that! :-)

The remainder of the trip back was pretty much uneventful.  The pass was mostly clear, though it did have a number of icy spots.  Nothing a little caution couldn't handle - though it did increase the blood pressure a few points at several of the icy turns!

Enough for now - it's bed time.

Stay tuned - more to come...

Rachel takes a lot of pride in how well her plants are doing.  Her Christmas Cactuses (Cacti?) are going NUTS this year and are especially beautiful.  What do you think?  I don't know what she is feeding them, but we should start marketing it! :-)

Stay tuned - more to come...

Also known as "Did I REALLY eat all of that?!?" :-)

The kitchen was a mess - a sure indication of a good meal being prepared.  However, in true "Tracey" fashion, the stupid bird didn't defrost fully, pushing our planned 5:00PM dinner out to about 7:00.  This is about the third year in a row that the bird didn't defrost in time.

Despite the minor delay, the meal came out great! 

We had a great time with Rebecca being in from Pullman (despite the outcome of the Apple Cup).  As always, its great to have her home again.  Now to get ready for tomorrow's drive back and forth to Pullman again!  And the passes look to be a mess this time.

As you can see, Jen and Rebecca had some great "Quality Time" together!  No, that's not an XBox - it's our old Nintendo Game Cube! :-)

Anyway - another holiday down - now we can start looking forward to Christmas Break!

Stay tuned - more to come...

Well, worse than the rain was the severe flooding throughout the region.  We were spared (I knew I bought a house on a hill for SOME reason!) but many of our friends were evacuated.  We haven't heard of any damages yet, but I'm sure there were some.

Mount Rainier did not fair well.  They had an insane amount of rain in a VERY short time.  17.9 inches of rain in 36 hours.  The rivers all swelled to new records and caused some severe damage.  Roads are just gone in some spots, one campground was totally eliminated...it just isn't there anymore.  There literally isn't even a trace of most of it.

Kevin Bacher - a friend and Ranger at Mount Rainier has pictures of the damage here:

Again - we faired fine, but the mountain again showed that man is nothing compared to the power of God.  This rain, which was part of a "100 year storm" showed that no matter how hard we try, God will always have the last say...

Stay tuned - more to come...