The Ice Man Is Here
We’ve been snowbound since Sunday night, no university classes, no travels up and down I-5. No quick jaunts to Safeway because it’s too nippy to walk. The hills are alive with the sound of tires spinning. We have a lot of hills.
This was a major snow event, although there’s no real comparison with our multi-day dump last February. Snow isn’t rare up here, just seldom seen, if that makes any sense – I’m not sure what the annual accumulation is, but there’s probably some every year on average. It just takes some weather work to get flakes, the right combination of factors (and that combination, particularly cold air with moisture, doesn’t happen often).
I know. Cold air + moisture = snow. That reads dumb now. But if you were here, you’d understand. We’re usually mild and moist. Snow messes with us, and then the hills and the lack of a Minnesota model, let’s say. We don’t have the infrastructure to deal efficiently with snow, because there’s no way to plan for what might not happen in any given winter. Or in any given part of the area.
In this case, a convergence zone set up Sunday night pretty much right over my house, as it tends to do, and we got 5-6 inches while Seattle proper got very little. It eventually moved south, but we had lingering showers over the past couple of days, along with a big chill. I walked up to the store yesterday, unsure of what was coming and running low on supplies, and got caught in a nice snowstorm on the way home. Big flakes, lots of them, and kind of fun.
Anyway, it was supposed to drop another 5 inches overnight, and I was ready for another day of shoveling and then staying inside. Julie’s had two snow days, classes that will need to be made up in some form, and today she’ll probably skip her church hours and not tackle the 30 miles down south, even with less snow overnight than anticipated (the system moved a bit further north, so it doesn’t seem like we got all that much, and apparently further south there was even less). We’re temporarily frozen in place, and it’s fine.
Last night, looking for a distraction, uncomfortably cold even with the heat turned way up (this room I’m in is right over our uninsulated garage, which starts to matter when the temperature drops into the 20s), I watched all six episodes of After Life, a Ricky Gervais series on Netflix that I guess I hadn’t noticed before. I was mildly attracted to the description of a features writer for a small local newspaper, sensing some familiarity with the subject matter.
The subject matter was dark, though. Gervais plays a widower, mourning the passing of his wife of 25 years, who died from breast cancer. It’s an easy Gervais role, a sarcastic attitude as a defense against the dark arts. It’s a pretty frank portrayal of suicidal ideation, and grim in this respect, but overall sort of sweet with a nice dose of hope toward the end of this season (apparently there’ll be more episodes this year). Well done, I’d say, and it didn’t seem to darken my mood much. Strange what one finds when one looks.
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I didn’t make a resolution or anything. I didn’t stop writing in this blog intentionally, and I didn’t stop writing. I just don’t understand blogging anymore.
Or much of anything, I guess. I follow current events relentlessly; I always have. I’m not interested in expressing clichés that everyone I care about probably understands just as well. Truth is elusive now, arbitrary and almost indistinguishable from opinion. Our republic is a train wreck, and a chunk of the electorate is doing the damage, dazzled by the shiny objects held up by sleazeballs.
You know all this, and I’m not interested in spewing or opining or anything at all, really. I appreciate the people who try, but I honestly think it’s pointless.
And mostly, I’m tired of writing for a public that includes people I wouldn’t want to talk to. Other social media give us the option of curating and limiting our audience. I haven’t figured that out in terms of blogging, assuming I’m still interested.
So that’s that. We’ll see, I suppose. I have some shoveling to do.
