It's a little late now...

...but here are some photos of the snow:

(Railroad Ave. from Cafe Adagio.)

(The hedges next door.)

(The collapsed walkway.)

...but the racing wheels really do look awesome.

This evening, Mitch and I enjoyed an impromtu walk home in the snow. All the trees were a-glitter, the air was crisp and clean, but we weren't out walking for pleasure, oh no, we were walking because we discovered, in the parking lot of Fred Meyer, that the back left wheel of our car was flat. (This discovery was, of course, preceded by a loud thump halfway down Lincoln St. and Mitch's startled "What was that?")

And so it was that we spent the dinner hour shoulder-to-shoulder with a few disgruntled folks waiting to get their snow tires, before finally quitting the scene and walking briskly down to the bus station, all the while reciting the positive aspects of the situation. Such as: the tire didn't go flat last week when I was driving, by myself, down to Seattle, nor did it go flat on Saturday, when we drove down to Everett and back in the rain. Mercifully, when it did go flat, the tire waited politely until we were half a block from a discount tire shop--that was quite considerate, I must say.

In the meantime, we're snug as bugs here at home, trying not to remember what it cost last time we had a tire replaced--because it escalated to having all four tires replaced with awesome-looking (but quite costly) 17-inch racing wheels, due to the some customizing that the previous owner had had done.

Thank you, previous owner. Thanks a bunch.

Snowed in: Day 3

It hasn't snowed since Sunday, but what snow we have has stuck. The snow has thawed a bit and then frozen, thawed and frozen, so that the ground is covered not so much by a blanket of snow as by a crust of it, literally glittering in the sun that has, at last, emerged this morning from behind its bank of white clouds.

Our apartment is warm, the windows fogged up by steam that must have risen off the many cups of tea we've steeped in the past three days (I have single-handedly done away with almost an entire box of Candy Cane Lane peppermint tea), and the whole place smells like baking: delicatta squash, chocolate chip cookies, turkey soup, reheated stuffing, meringue cookies dipped in chocolate. Food has kept me busy, since, due to an absence of patients (nearly every one scheduled for the last two days has cancelled), work has not.

In fact, I haven't worked in nearly a week, which we can blame on snow, the holiday, and those sick days spent with Arrested Developement and origami boxes. The time off has been pleasant, restful, full of reading, cleaning, writing, gift-making, baking, drinking tea and sleeping in, but such a high dose of forced relaxation can make one feel a bit, well, cabin-feverish after a while. This, combined with the fact that we had less than half a roll of toilet paper left, prompted Mitch and I to venture outside yesterday on a quest to the grocery store.

Since we aren't used to this sort of weather here, snow always catches me off guard, and every year I realize how pitifully prepared I am for cold weather--and every year, I do nothing about it. I don't own a ski coat or snow boots, and the old pair of ski pants I have are on indefinate loan from my parents, so dressing for the cold usually entails layers and layers and layers of clothes. By the time we left the building I was bundled up so tight that I felt more than a little like the kid from A Christmas Story, and I nearly toppled right over while bending down to tie my shoes.

The first thing we realized, upon attempting to actually leave our building, was that we were honestly, truly snowed in. The way our front walkway is constructed leaves us with a narrow, though picturesque, alley between the side of the building and a row of tall, green hedges. This passes under a stucco archway before reaching the street, and what we found was that the snow had drifted above the level of the door, so that we had to dig out a path for the door before we could actually open it wide enough to squeeze through. Then, we saw that the snow, nearly a foot deep, had filled the narrow walkway, and the hedges, weighted down by snow, had bent over toward the building, leaving spaces less than a foot high at the lowest and no more than four feet high at the highest for us to crawl through before we could reach the archway.

We almost literally had to tunnel our way out. It was awesome.

I said "several inches" of snow,

but what I really meant was "ten." Ten inches of snow. In Bellingham. In November. Unheard of!

It snowed!

Now, usually when somebody from Bellingham says that, people from places where it actually snows roll their eyes and mock our piddly snowfall, as it tends to melt on impact or, if it sticks, amount to a whopping 3/4 of an inch--which is then gone by the afternoon.

But this, my friends, is snow. It sticks! It piles up on shrubberies and sidewalks and makes the roads slick and buries our Subaru under several (note: several) inches of crisp, white covering. It turns fingers pink and sticks to clothes and keeps on coming down.

I think I'm calling us "snowed in," just because it sounds nice and because we have nowhere else we need to be.