Jaci Dawn

Sorry I missed yesterday. I was going to write about the “o-my-god-it’s-snowing!” drivers but, really, once I got into a lane that was going faster than they were, I got to work on time and without any scary moments. All the snow that fell melted as soon as it touched the ground, and what’s the fun in that?

It was still spitting snow off and on all day yesterday and sometimes it was sticking. The REAL storm was supposed to move through last night, dumping up to 4″ of snow on the hills around Portland and up to 8″ in Seattle. There was hope early in the evening that we’d get real snow, but it all moved north and east of us.

I read on Facebook that, “Washington (State) stole our snow! Who’s in favor of demanding they give it back?”

I’m not. Seattle can have the excitement.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t sort of exciting here.

Sometime around two in the morning I woke up and looked for my alarm clock. My alarm clock is hard to miss. Sometimes I lay it on its face so the red LED lights don’t blind me when I wake up in the night. Since I couldn’t see it this morning, my first groggy thought was that I’d done that. But I looked for Don’s alarm clock and it wasn’t there, either.

“UGH. The power’s out.”

Don groaned. “I have a travel clock but I don’t know where it is…”

“I have a cell phone.” I said this in my most smug ‘don’t-you-wish-you-were-part-of-the-21st-Century’ voice because he does not have a cell phone and he doesn’t know how useful one is when the power is out.

I set my cell phone alarm for 4AM so Don could go to work. When he left for work at 5:15, he brought me the flashlight. I reset my cell phone for 6:30. I figured I probably wasn’t going to be taking a shower in the cold, dark house… But I did get to light all those odorifous candles that people have given me over the years and the house smelled pretty while I tried to put make-up on in the dark. I even managed to put on matching shoes and socks (I can’t do that with the lights on some mornings).

It was still very dark when I left at 7:20AM. Dark, not as cold, definitely raining hard.In short, except for the little trace of last night’s snow on the ground, it looked like a very normal January morning in the metro area.

And there, traced across the remnants of the snow, were the tracks of a burglar.

He’d been casing the parked cars.

I hopped to it and took several photos of the evidence before deciding I’d better put the car in gear and see what traffic was like.

I’ll spare you most of the details, but I probably would have made better time with an outboard motor on the back of my car. Wheeeeee!

So Seattle got our snow and we were without power for hours so I didn’t get to shower before I went to work. It was a brutal winter snow storm in my neighborhood. That’s usually how it goes when all of our news stations tell us to be prepared for the “Big Snow Event”: it doesn’t happen.

But now we have a Pineapple Express bearing down on us instead and the predictions are altered to lots of flooding.

And in that, they will be accurate. lots of wind and lots of rain. I may invest in that outboard motor.

Meanwhile, I am wondering about our early morning burglar…

I got a pretty clear hand, er- paw, print. Rocky, we have you “red-handed”!