This is not normal.

This is getting silly.

My first few years out here, Seattle’s attitude towards snow was cute, nay, adorable. It would snow an inch, the entire city would shut down, cars would fly off the road, and there would be flaming barrels of trash in downtown Bellevue because that is the sort of thing a dystopian present requires. I’d get the day off work, try to make a snowman but run out of snow, it would melt, and then life would go on.

After a week with incessant snowfall accumulating amounts that could only be described as notable, I’m concerned that Seattle’s hands-off approach to dealing with snow may not be scalable to actual snowfall. Strangely, shrugging and saying,”Well, it’ll melt, right?” isn’t doing the trick this time. To be fair, they have deployed all 27 snowplows they have (I had heard that it was 30, but some may have been lost in action) to clear major streets. By which they mean pack it down so that people with chains may be able to travel of some flat roads with only a couple of buses flying off an overpass. But what can they, the lowly Department of Transportation do?

Future Son is handling this well.

Salt is bad for the environment, so that’s right out. Sand is also bad for the environment, but it’s effective for as much as thrity seconds, so tons of that have been dropped. There’s also been some chemicals dumped to de-ice the roads, which is great for the environment no doubt, but only works on windshields I think. They even use childproof snowplows with rubber edges so that they won’t hurt streets, or remove ice. At least the purported windstorm that was going to destroy us all apparently had its flight cancelled due to weather and is somewhere it Atlanta, watching CNN on a tiny TV and blowing quietly to itself.

The amount of snow that Seattle receives has been steadily increasing each year I’ve lived here, as shown on this handy chart (chart not shown, I make enough of those at work). By my projections, in 2021, around the time Future Son is really getting into meth because I have failed as a parent, we’ll have 37 feet of snow and also polar bears will wander through the vast tundra that was Seattle, climbing down chimneys looking for warmth and picnic baskets like an anti-Santa. But, hey, I’m not in charge of a major city, so what do I know about keeping the city running smoothly in the face of such adversity as six inches of snow over a few days.

Where’s she going? To Crazytown.

So I stay home and watch my dwindling supply of Honey Nut Cheerios. I ventured out at 4 am on Thursday morning to take the mother-in-law and some other guy to the airport and nearly died (my car skidded a little). I went in to work the next day for a cameo appearance that involved opening office doors randomly and saying something clever to thunderous applause. Since then, I’ve stayed home and tried to convince the Littlest Wife that this is the wrong time to begin running again. Generally, I just work on my Netflix queue. That is going well, though I am concerned that if Baby Finntastico sees any more black and white movies, his first words will be “dollface” or “Ay, whatchoo tryin’ ta pull, mistah?”