Snow time!

The Portland area was blanketed with snow today -- I just got home, and brrr, is it cold out there! It seems to be about three to four inches deep in most places.

The stuff makes driving pretty hazardous, of course. Here is some video supplied to a local news station by a man who filmed fifteen car crashes just from his own home.

Now, some of you living in parts of the country with more bracing weather may be thinking, "Three inches of snow? What's the big deal?" The reason it's a problem is that this typically only happens here for two or three days at a time, every two or three years -- you'll notice on the video that the newsreader mentions 2004, the last year we had conditions comparable to this (in fact, that was worse, with freezing rain and slippery ice -- where I lived at the time, even the mail and daily newspaper were not delivered for three days). Because "snow days" are so rare, people do not have a chance to get used to them and get familiar with how to drive safely under such conditions. Today even buses were sliding around, and I saw at least a dozen empty ones about town which had either stalled or been abandoned as too dangerous to drive. If we get freezing rain again, the city will be essentially paralyzed. I've seen it before.

So I'm staying home as much as possible until it melts. Leave the streets to the macho ding-dongs who somehow thinks the laws of physics don't apply to them.