jenk | Entries tagged with weather

I do not like this hotter land,
I do not like it, Sam-I-Am!

Hopefully this was the hottest day of 2007 here in Seattle; I welcome the temps going down. I am glad I was able to spend most of it in AC. (And the non-AC was quite worth Tricky Pixie!) Currently I'm relaxing before bed ... wonder if this will help...

Lately I've found the daylight map to be fascinating. Where the sun is, where it isn't, 'tis nifty.

At the same time, it's scary how much of the northern hemisphere is in sun right now. ~15.5 hours of sun to ~8.5 of dark just feels like too much. I miss the 10-to-12 hour cycles we get in spring and fall. Yay sleep mask.

Current Mood: tired

I've been having problems getting to sleep. Never mind how tired I am in the morning, or during the day; by midnight I'm wired. I should do laundry, take out garbage, work, read, tidy, put away. Anything but sleep.

A few days ago I realized: Right, it's the end of June. Summer solstice is on the way. Seattle is getting nearly 16 hours of daylight every day right now. I mean, it's 9:20pm as I type this and it is light outside. I know the lack of light in December gets to me; why shouldn't the extra light affect me too?

Oh well, it could be worse. Fairbanks, say. And then there's Finland, or St Petersburg...

Current Mood: tired

Recently I've been reminded of a picture my parents have. It's of Dad & I in the snow. Dad is standing next to a snowman "we" had made, with snow up to his knees. I am standing on top of the snow, or rather, on top of a crust of ice on the snow. Obviously I was rather young.

Reading about the 1969 snowstorm in HistoryLink, I think that was probably the year. I would have been nearly 3.

I remember at least one other time as a child when we had a foot of snow in Shoreline that lasted more than a day or two. But again, it was over 30 years ago.

(Yes, we still have snow. We got about an inch last night and this morning. When I left home at 2 our street was icy but the main streets were either dry or sandy slush.)

Current Mood: bored

I think the last time I woke up to white stuff on the ground 3 days in a row I was in Colorado. Some years ago I did two days of on-campus interviews in Fort Collins (north of Denver) and I discovered a few things. One was that driving in snow and ice is something you do get used to. It just takes practice. Which I had, since I flew into Denver & drove to drove to Fort Collins on day one, drove around Fort Collins for 2 days, then back to Denver on day 4. Another thing I discovered was that it's really easy to tell the points of the compass on I-25. The mountains are west. Everything else is flat.

Meanwhile in Redmond, I keep surprising people by driving around in snow and ice. I did skid slightly today; took my foot off the gas, steered into the skid, all was well. I didn't even swerve. Of course, I'm also cautious enough to generally stay in the Redmond area, to warm up the car before leaving - including defrosting windows - and to make sure I don't need to be in a hurry.

A few things did happen today.

skydancer installed the dishwasher that had flummoxed Home Depot's installers. He had a miracle device to create a path for the drain hose through the cabinet wall between the sink and the dishwasher. It's called a "drill", but don't tell anyone, apparently it's a secret super-weapon. We now have clean dishes, yay.

Dinner was spaghetti: I browned ground beef & garlic, added some zinfandel, cooked it down a bit, then put the hamburger mixture into the crock pot with diced tomatoes, a yellow bell pepper, an onion, mushrooms, olives, and tomato sauce. Why the crock pot? Because I was starting this before we dealt with the dishwasher. Crock pot meals tend not need much attention. They also do not have to be in the kitchen, which is a bonus when you're, oh, installing a dishwasher. After the dishwasher was done I served the sauce over bow-tie pasta. After dinner I added more tomato sauce and tomato paste to the sauce. Tomorrow I may add more veggies.

And Heather Alexander's last CD, Everafter, arrived today. I like it. :)

Current Mood: good

Creme de Menthe, actually, as I prefer it to peppermint schnapps. I am rewarding myself for not letting the traffic get to me earlier & for helping

dustin_00,

jw1776, and

skydancer get Dustin's car.

I feel very virtuous. I also feel very wiped out. So I will sip my hot cocoa (spiked with creme de menthe and a touch of cream) and toddle off to bed.

Thank God Jesse made dinner...he fed Dustin too.

Current Mood: accomplished

We had a light dusting of snow last night. Second time this year, so that's, what, 4 years' worth of snow for our corner of the NorthWet? :)

Current Mood: amused

I had decided that what I most needed to reset my emotional equilibrium would be to improve my home environment, aka exerting control over what I could. At minimum:

Get garbage and recycling out to the curb, including fridge contents (side-by-side freezer is already empty).
Clean off & put away at least 1/2 the stuff on the kitchen table & library coffee table.
Do dishes - if I didn't have enough light to trust hand washing, at least get the dirty ones scraped and into the dishwasher.
Get at least one load of laundry done (hollyking & hollyqueen were the closest of those who'd offered, so I was going to send Jesse over with at least one load of carefully picked items).
General pick up and put away.

If I could borrow a friend's generator, I also planned to reinforce the freezer's chilliness, run the furnace fan, and vacuum.

As we do have power on,

Garbage and recycling are out at the curb. Our fridge is rather empty at the moment.
Kitchen table and coffee table are muchly decluttered.
Dishwasher just finished; a few large items were hand-washed.
Jesse folded and put away all the afghans & extra blankets that have been lying around downstairs.
I vacuumed.
Jesse's and my first laundry loads are done, skydancer has some clothing in the dryer, and I just put some towels & such in the washer.
I have been testing things for work.
I just put water on for some tea.

....and I feel much better.

Of course, the perverse tester part of my brain is wishing the power hadn't come back on until 11pmish, just so I could know how much of the "feeling better" is getting things more organized vs the power being back on. But overall I think I don't need to feed that particular perversion right now.

Current Mood: relieved

Modern Life[tm] without power is interesting. However, it is NOT up to Wash's definition of "interesting", which, for the Serenity-impaired, is: "Oh god, oh god, we're all going to die."

Reminding myself of this can be proportion-making.

What we've lost: ( Read more... ) ...I was writing up the stuff still at risk and my plan for getting my emotional equilibrium back to around "normal" when two things happened:

dustin_00 IMd that our outside lights are ON, , and
My company's HR specialist offered to put us up in the Sheraton until our power is restored. (Which, um, I declined, as it has been restored. But still.)

I feel really really good right now.

Current Mood: amazed
Current Location: work

skydancer linked to this info on Puget Sound Energy's site:

Woodinville area
Because of the severe damage in this area, we expect restoration efforts here to continue late into the week, perhaps Friday or Saturday. Many customers remain without service in the Woodinville area, one of our hardest-hit communities. Work currently is focused on restoring the community's high-voltage transmission grid and the three substations that serve the Cottage Lake and Hollywood Hills area. Once this work is complete, we can then concentrate solely on repairing damage to the local distribution lines.

Redmond, Kirkland, Bothell and Kenmore areas
Restoration of the heavily damaged distribution lines here likely will continue until Wednesday or Thursday, though final restoration in isolated pockets in the Juanita, Inglewood, and Avondale areas may not be complete until sometime this weekend. Power has been restored to many homes and businesses in these communities. Service has been restored to all substations and we are now repairing local distribution lines to restore everyone's' power as quickly as we can.

Mercer Island
Two of three substations serving Mercer Island have been restored, with the third expected to be energized later today [Monday]. Many customers have regained service on the north half of Mercer Island. Some customers on the south end of the island will be restored later today, but complete restoration of the island's heavily damaged distribution lines likely will continue late into the week, perhaps Friday or Saturday. Our electric system sustained tremendous damage on the island from falling trees and limbs.

Current Mood: nervous

Me: Work has power. Home does not. Home lost power Thursday night about 10pm, so we're on day 4 at this point. A friend brought over his generator yesterday for a few hours, which let us kick up the freezer temp back down & the house temp back up. Our freezer has a warning light for when the temp is too high which did not turn on when we plugged the freezer into the generator yesterday, so yay.

General region:

We've made good progress repairing the backbone transmission system. So far, we've repaired about half of the 85 transmission lines taken down by the storm, and by re-routing power loads, we've re-energized 129 of the 159 substations that lost power from the storm. As we continue to work on restoring the local power-distribution system, we will be able to develop more community-specific information. - from http://www.pse.com

On the "still a few more days" list: Cougar Mountain in Bellevue, rural Woodinville, parts of North Bend, Snoqualmie, Duvall, Carnation and Skykomish in east King County, Issaquah, Lake Hills in Bellevue, Fall City, Fairwood, Lake Youngs and possibly others. (Source: PSE & the Seattle Times) I guess I can be glad Redmond isn't on that list....

In terms of infrastructure, most of Seattle's back up. Most of downtown Bellevue through Microsoft campus - including the Overlake commercial area (156th-140th x 24th - 20th) - is back up ... which means many of our neighbors can at least shower and have a hot breakfast at work :) Some of Kirkland is up - I would think the area around Evergreen Hospital near Totem Lake, but I haven't checked. Downtown Redmond is up, which not only is convenient for me in terms of hitting area restaurants or the library for food, phone recharge and internet, but also it's the home of the wells which provide Redmond with water (I assume the well pumps have backup generators with limited supplies of gas).

So yeah, we're holding out. Hope all is well with y'all....

Current Mood: awake

Tip I got from an article on business traveling: If you want to recharge in an airport (or coffeeshop, or other wifi-enabled location) carry a power strip along with your laptop and ac adapter. That way you can smile nicely at someone who's got an outlet and ask if you could plug BOTH laptops into the power strip. I've done it twice today in my info-quest. Currently ze laptop is on battery, but my cell, someone else's cell, and two other people's laptops are plugged in :)

-o-

We came through the storm pretty unscathed; 3 fence sections down, a neighbor's tree in our backyard, but no damage to us, the house or vehicles. Unlike

dustin_00's next-door-neighbor who had a tree crash into his bedroom (eep!!!) Still no power, but plenty of hot water;

runnerwolf and

dianthus both used my shower yesterday. We ended up with an inpromptu party by candlelight last night - most of the perishables are eaten now. :) Power was back in downtown Redmond (but not our hill!) this morning so we went out for breakfast. Cell is about charged, so I may pack up and see about actual books ...

Current Mood: lazy
Current Location: library

OK, this even more local that my last update. King County's official road closure list, which is no doubt a bit incomplete: http://www.metrokc.gov/kcdot/roads/roadalert/

The local NBC affiliate has been tracking info here, including:

520 bridge closed in both directions
I-90 HOV lanes shut down due to power problems with the reversible lane gates
SR 405 closed northbound at the West Valley Highway
Highway 99 closed at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, northbound at 112th in Everett
Southbound I-5 closed south of Chehalis
Highway 12 closed in both directions in Rochester, Thurston Co.
Deception Pass Bridge closed at the north end of Whidbey Island
SR 6 closed in both directions in Lewis County between MP 30 and 51
SR 101 multiple lane closure along west bank of Hood Canal
SR 11 (Chuckanut Drive) closed in both directions at MP3
Sea-Tac airport is without power in the A concourse; many flights delayed or canceled.

And, of course, I have no idea if anyone local can even read this!

Current Mood: amused

So ...um... home to candlelight and, potentially, sleep ... or ... hm ... decisions, decisions ....

Current Mood: unsure

Last night the 520 eastbound backup nearly met the 520 westbound backup. As I would generally prefer to noodle away on the net (or even work) rather than sit in my car for hours, I arranged to have dinner near work with

skydancer and kept working away.

Then a coworker came by. "Kate just called me to say our parking lot is flooded and she barely got out you better get going or you'll have to spend the night!"

( I made it out )

( Power out in Redmond, South Kirkland, North Bellevue, and probably lots more... ) but the area near Overlake Hospital is up. I ended up having breakfast at the new Marriott Courtyard on NE 8th and 110th. Which is where I'm typing this, using the 1-day-free wireless. The Bellevue Library has power too, but it doesn't open til 10. And according to our IT guy, work has (temporary) power at least...so I'm off to the monthly all-hands meeting (if they're having it). I'm still tired, but at least I had planned to take a half-day of vacation today anyway...

Hope all is well with y'all! No trees falling on houses!

Current Mood: awake

From the DOT website:

If the high winds hit as expected, crews will close the SR 520 Evergreen Point Bridge late tonight. High winds also are likely to close the SR 104 Hood Canal Bridge to motor vehicle traffic and possibly disrupt ferry schedules.

WSDOT’s goal is to get all of the Seattle Seahawks traffic across the SR 520 bridge by 11 p.m. and then begin the closure. The bridge would remain closed to traffic until the storm passes Friday morning.

My car was hot. The AC was cool, but not enough to cool the entire cabin. At least that's what I thought, until...
I got outside the car to get cash. Hot. Humid. Encasing my body.
Damn, the car is cool. Yay.
Get home, park the car in the hot garage. Throw pop cans into the recycling, unload various other things.
Inside the laundry room is cool. And the dryer's on. Jesse must have put my clothing in the dryer. Yay. Jesse.
Oh my, the house is cooler than the laundry room. The dryer must put off a lot of heat. Put things away, wander around...
Boy, I'm sweaty. I think I'll sit by the fan. How high is the AC?

Current Mood: relaxing

Today I turned the desk fan on for the first time since last fall. It seems absurd to be running it now, but I'm sweating.

How can it be so humid during a drought?