It seems I got out and did a few things this year. I’m pretty sure, anyway, because I seem to have taken pictures of quite a bit of it.
And, gosh, it looks like some of you were there for some of it, too. And for those of you who weren’t, let’s get together in ’09. Deal?
I sure love this city of mine, although I do not love the part where it has been no warmer than 28 degrees in the part where I live for the past week or so. They say we can expect to get a thaw by Friday but I’ll believe it when it happens. Meanwhile, my apartment has no heat, but I think there’s enough whiskey to get us through the next few days.
In the meantime, I guess it’s kinda pretty.
For those of you that celebrate Christmas I hope you have a good one tomorrow.
I walked into work on Monday, cursing my lack of foresight in that I don’t own a pair of snowshoes, and my lack of balance in that I slid ten feet down an ice-covered ramp balanced on only my hipbone and an elbow, and with hardly anyone else in the office I tooled around the internets a bit more than usual and discovered that the weekend’s snowfall was more than Portland has seen in a December since 1968.
We’re ill-equipped for that kind of weather in this city. Give us flood conditions and Portlanders will stomp around town in boots and oversized jackets just like always, but with snow nobody quite knows what to do. Just the rumor that snow might be coming caused schools to close down and most people to huddle up at home all last week; when the snow finally arrived, and we ended up with more than the city had seen in forty years, pandemonium ensued. Tracy has taken to calling our local weather SNOWMAGEDDON and I’m inclined to agree. Still, some of us braved the elements and got a little creative.
We’ll be snowed in for Christmas, but to me that just means empty streets for me to walk around in and take more pictures. Since I don’t think anyone is reading blogs this week anyway I’ll just keep posting snow pictures. They’ll be waiting here when you get back from wherever it is you all fly off to during this time of year.
After a whole week of keeping us on the collective edges of our seats the snow finally fell on Portland, promptly burying all the roads and driving the ill-prepared populace into a frenzy of driving into snowbanks. People are finding ways to cope, but what’s that they say about a pinch of prevention? If you’ve got the sense to prepare yourself before the blizzard hits you’ll do all right. I concede I didn’t put much planning into my preparations but things ended up working out well so feel free to copy my method.
First of all, to ward off the worst of the cold make sure to ONLY consume drinks that are actually on fire.
Throw some good company into the mix, and some warm scarves, and if you both have a friend in Chicago maybe you can call her, and gosh if you can find bars with pretty waitresses where they scoop thimblefulls of moonshine right out of a barrel for you then you’re more or less set.
You don’t have to follow these steps to the letter, but it’s what I did and I think I’ll have no problem grinning through the snow-filled days ahead.
The other week I wandered over to the Scandinavian Fair being hosted over at the local university, admittedly in hopes of meeting Swedish girls. Instead I discovered that there are no Scandinavians in the Pacific Northwest younger than fifty or with a sweater rated better than “awful”. I also discovered this:
Does anyone have any idea what this instrument is? It’s held like a guitar, but he uses a curved bow to play it like a fiddle, and it’s got all those keys along the neck. Any takers?
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