Winter Under Glass

 I got up around four to use the bathroom and the snow was falling thickly, like molasses. You know how molassessy snow can get.

It’s 8:30 now and the snow continues. There is easily three inches on the ground. I’m going out at 9:00 with my leaf blower to clean up the front porch and blow the snow off the front steps.

I plan to wait out the snow before I go for the heavy equipment and blow the neighborhood.

In the meantime, it’s time for breakfast.

10:37AM: I just checked the webcams at Mt Spokane and captures this shot from the Snow Stake.

Then I clicked on the webcam focused on the Hour Glass and caught this adventurous guy.

An inspiration that I shall not emulate!

6:02PM: It finally stopped snowing around 3 and I got out to finish what Susan and I started earlier. We had about 7 inches.

It turns out that this was another batch of really wet snow. It took the snow blower a long time to get through it.

Susan insisted on helping and I thought it was high time she learned how to run the snow blower.

It's all cleaned up out there for now. They say more snow is coming on Friday.

More Wonderland on the Way

We’re very excited. Well, I’m very excited. Susan is mildly excited. There is a winter storm warning starting about now and continuing through tomorrow. We are supposed to get eight to twelve inches of snow. 

I went out and got gas for the snow blower so I guess I’m as ready as I’m going to be.

My weather app says it’s going to start snowing in about half an hour. I’ll check back and let you know how accurate that was.

8:07PM: The weather app just updated and now snow is 50 minutes away.

10:59PM: Okay, my weather app sucks. No snow yet. Susan says it won't start until 2:00AM. I guess I'll find out in the morning.

Winter Wonderland II

Some time between 5:00 and 8:00 this morning, it started to snow. And I woke up to this picturesque vista.

If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see small snow flakes falling everywhere. There is an old Indian saying that I have used here before: Little Snow, Big Snow. There was about an inch and a half of snow and more to come.  Up to three inches was forecast. 

So we shall see if this little snow will become a big snowfall.

Hoarder House

I have made a commitment to myself to spend a little time every day cleaning up and organizing the Carriage House.

It all began yesterday when I decided to pull my Traeger Smoker in out of the cold weather and get it cleaned up. I've left it out in the snow and rain and it has stopped working again. Fortunately, I have dealt with this before and know more about what I'm doing. 

But I need to make room in the Carriage House for doing such projects. So yesterday, I started trying to tidy up. There is soooooo much shit in there that needs to just go away. 

Unfortunately, I'm not capable of doing that. I think I'm one step away from qualifying as a hoarder.

Here's how it looks today. We'll check back in a week and see where we are.

  

Thanksgiving 2022

The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving has always been one of Susan's favorite nights to go out. You have Thanksgiving to look forward to and four days off from work. 

So last night we went out with Ron, Kelly and Mark to the Red Lion, which has recently re-opened under new owners.

Although it was nice to get out with friends, the night did not have the usual luster we remember. We concluded it was because we are retired now and every day is a day off.

On our way home, we started talking about Thanksgiving last year and what we did. Neither of us can remember. I looked back at this Blog to see what we did and I got no clue.

So this year, I'm going to make sure we have a record of the holiday.

We are hosting 11 peoples tonight. Along with Susan and I, there will be my son, Scott, his girlfriend Erica and her three kids, our friends Randy and Karen, and Scott's old boss, Drew and his girlfriend.

We have a ton of food planned. Susan is putting the turkey in the oven shortly and I'll be throwing a salmon on the grill. Karen is bringing a bunch of sides and I think it very possible that we won't run out of food.

I shall take lots of pictures and post a few of them here in just the next few paragraphs. In the meantime, I've got some work to do.

I'm afraid that's all I got for pictures. 

3:00PM: I am about to put the fish on the grill. It been heating up for 20 minutes and ready for fishy goodness.

7:00PM: Unfortunately, it didn't work out quite the way I planned. The charcoal I used would not light. I've had problems with this charcoal before and bought good ol' Kingsford Charcoal that I used up over the course of the summer.

Anyway, we made it work with a final shot in the microwave.

Everyone enjoyed a bunch of food, I met Erica's children and have a couple of questions about the two year old...whose favorite word appears to be "No!"

Holiday Decorating 2022

We have just returned home from finishing our last Holiday Decorating Job. YEA!

We got shut out of painting skywalks last winter because a new entity took over holiday decorating for downtown and they weren't interested in having us paint the skywalks.

This year, I got a call from one of the skywalk tenants who asked if we still decorated the skywalks. I explained what happened but they still wanted their two skywalks decorated. I managed to lock down three more.

In addition, we painted the windows at an assisted living facility on the South Hill, which we finished today.

So here it is, not even Thanksgiving, and our Holiday painting is complete. That feels pretty good.   

Boiler Game Scandal😢

 I have just come upon an interesting yet disappointing statistic. We did not break the Boiler Game record this year. 

I somehow missed that our record was set in 2011 on October 26th. I previously thought the record was October 21st, set back in 2015.

So now I am very sad and a bit disheartened. I thought we really beat it this year and I was thrilled. 

It takes very little to thrill me.

Three Inches and Rising

It’s one week since Halloween and it is all but a memory. Everything has been stowed in its proper place. I even managed to create a little more room up in the Carriage House with some creative stacking. Now it’s time to move on to our unusual weather.

I believe the climate is changing. Much the way it has for the last many thousands of years. While I think that human activity contributes to the changes, I don’t think we are the main contributors. Again, climate changes. It always has. Humans adapt to the weather. We always have.

That being said, we’ve had a really weird year of weather. Spring lasted through June, which was very wet and may have set a record for rainfall. At the very least, we came close to matching a record. 

Summer was hot and lingered well into October. The first 19 days of the month had daily high temperatures in the 70s. That was a record.

Now it’s November 7th and I wake up to this.

I’m measuring 3 inches over night here at the house. The snow continues to fall which is why I’m not out with my snow blower. But I will be.

Here’s a screen shot I took of the Mt Spokane Snow Stake.

There’s another eight inches up there on top of at least nine inches they got last week. I haven’t seen a figure from the Mt Spokane staff on total snow depth so far. They still have a ways to go before they can open.

I can remember only once in my life that we were skiing before Thanksgiving. It was back in the 70s. We have the potential to beat Thanksgiving this year, but I'm not going to dwell on it. Just let it happen.

Serenity Now!

12:28PM: I have just come in from snow blowing. I covered the whole block like I usually do. This was easily the most difficulty I've had snow blowing since I got the thing 24 years ago. The snow is wet. I don't mean damp. I mean, how can it even be snow with so much wetness saturated in it.

I would blow a swath and then have to dig the compacted slush out of the chute. It was just horrible. Add to that, all the leaves that we meant to rake up yesterday but decided to put off for a day.

Did I say it was horrible?! It was!!! 

Halloween Hangover

It is the morning after and we are still feeling pretty rung out. We were enjoying the fact that we are now retired and didn’t have to get up at 5:30 this morning. That was a happy thought.

So now we have to start cleaning up. It’s almost eleven and we haven’t started yet. Add to that the fact that it’s been raining since we shut everything down last night.

I will check back with updates.

12 Noon: We got all the craft pumpkins stowed and the balcony cleaned off and returned to normal. I’m going to work on removing the lights from the front porch.

4:08 PM: Well, we have done pretty good. A damn good start, in any event. We got the first wave of stuff out of the kitchen and up into the Carriage House.

I got all the lights down from the front porch and it’s looking almost back to normal out there, except for the three ghouls hanging from the tree.

The rain continues to fall so we are pacing ourselves until it stops, which doesn’t look like today.   

1485

We have survived Halloween but we are exhausted.

We are coming to a point where we have to ask how much is too much.

As you can see from the pictures, we kind of go nuts for Halloween. But it is coming to a point where we are getting too old for all this. It takes a week of mild preparation, getting stuff out of storage in the upstairs of the Carriage House, getting batteries into the things that need batteries, pounding stakes in the ground for our impromptu fence. It's becoming quite an ordeal...even for retired people.

It's always fun once the action starts and it is still unbelievable to see the number of people who show up in our neighborhood. As noted in the title of this post, we really had 1485 kids come to the house this year.

And we would be remiss to not mention the friends who help us out. Thanks to Randy, Karen, Robba, Ellen, Mark, Kyle and Krystal. We could not do this without you. Seriously, we would be dead.

I'm so glad it's over.

Here are s'more pictures.