Snomg

It snowed a little Sunday and and some more on Monday.
Temperatures dropped. It got windy.
Seattle freaked out.
It's what we do.
A half inch of the white stuff and it's instant gridlock on I-5. A ten minute drive slows into a six hour nightmare commute. Schools close down. Metro chains up. Jim Forman suits up in enough Gore-Tex to outfit a division of Army Rangers.
Me, I stayed calm. Worse comes to worst, I can walk home from work. I stuck around, had drinks with a friend. Caught a bus to the Fortress of Solitude. Wrote for awhile. Waited around for the 30. Walked past a huge sledding party at the bottom of Queen Anne hill. Stopped in for hot toddies at the bar near my place and talked with another pal about art and sex and music. Shivered my way home around 1.30 and fired up the electric blanket. Talked to a tipsy friend on the phone at two a.m. until we were both too sleepy to continue.
A chill, yet cozy evening.
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Snomg ht

Greenery

In Port Angeles yesterday I was amazed again by the green.
A zillion--yep I counted--shades of green lushness.
It's rain forest country. Ferns thrive in gutters. Stuff left outside molds. Dandelions shoot up to your waist if you're not careful.
Every time somebody complains about the weather (read: rain), I think, you don't get a zillion shades of verdant green without a little rain falling.

Overheard around town, Juneuary edition

On the 18 to Ballard last night, two drunk dudes checked each other's street cred.
"You like Scooby snacks?"
Nah, man, them's for kids.
"No, man, you ever been in the penitentiary? No? King County Jail?"
Proudly: Never been locked up.
"That's what they call breakfast sausage in the King County Jail. 'Scooby snacks.' If somebody asks 'do you like Scooby snacks' you better say hell yeah."
*
The 30 to Fremont this afternoon felt like a scene from Wings of Desire, with snippets of strangely endearing conversations percolating around the back of the coach.
I don't know what I want to do with my life.
"Dudes, there's this new movie coming out with Nicolas Cage and the Rock!"
I just want to be happy. I don't care what I'm doing, as long as I'm happy.
"So you don't get off at this stop." "Uh--no."
I want to learn French. But I think I'd speak it with a Japanese accent.
"You think he can excuse their pathetic defense the past two matches? Like I excused those two knuckleheads in class earlier? No, I didn't think so."

Twenty Ten

About a year ago I wrote about a very cold but cleansing trip to Port Angeles on New Year's Day. I still had a lot on my mind as 2009 staggered out the door, so I repeated the trip a few days ago.
No snow this year, but rain thrummed gently against the windows. Moss sprouted in light green tufts across the sodden ground and coated once-bare tree branches in airy, snowy clumps. Blown-over trees and cut cedar trunks lined the gravel road, still red, like raw meat, a testament to recent windstorms (and industrious neighbors).
The moon was out the second night, round and intense and bright. Waking up at two a.m., I fumbled for the switch overhead, thinking for a minute I'd left a light on.

The leaves they are a-changing

Not sure if this pressure-cooker summer has anything to do with it but the leaves are already starting to change in Seattle. This perfect golden specimen drifted to the pavement in front of me yesterday. There's something so lovely about the contrast between the rough-textured, pebbly cement and the fragile leaf.

Scenes from a hot city

The temperature topped 100 degrees in Seattle yesterday. We’re so not used to it. A few pollyannas say they enjoy it, and loudly proclaim their newfound love affair with the sun. The rest of us walk around slowly, blinking and frowning, alternately cranky or bewildered.

The unrelenting heat is prompting questionable sartorial decisions. I saw my supervisor in a miniskirt. For every lithe young campus hottie running around in flip flops and cutoffs, there's the Rubenesque bare-chested old guy with sweat dripping off his wrinkled nipples.

An older manager at work abandoned his computer, rolled up a copy of the campus paper and chased around an errant fly.

29 Seattle-area friends on my facebook page posted about the weather. No more archly clever posts; we're recording triple digit temperatures in our kitchens, posting screen shots of KING5, and passing around beat-the-heat tips (water soaked headbands, running through sprinklers) .

On my bus, no one talks. No one's sleeping. We all have zombie stares, behind our shades. And overhead, the sun continues to shine.

Dried to a crisp

Dried flowers were big in the 1980's, and I hated them.
Hated the dessicated rose headbands and clumps of pungent eucalyptus and the dried out baby's breath (don't most babies' breath smell of up chuck?). Everywhere you went people had silk flower or dried flower arrangements bound with satin ribbon and hanging on their walls, gathering dust in windowsill vases, even nestled in women's hairdos. So romantic, ladies sighed. So Victorian and sweet.
It might be why all the dead grass and dried out weeds around town are giving me the creeps. Everywhere you look, the grass is blindingly blond. It looks like crew-cut hay. These are some weeds I saw in an abandoned lot. I did like the sunburst appeal of the bristly dry heads. I imagine if you sat down, you'd be picking sharp little stickers out of your ass for quite awhile.