Our lovely winter so far...

Yippee! The snow is gone at long last. Well, except for the giant piles plowed up in parking lots and along curbs, but those will melt eventually.

But in this winter of extremes the snow was followed by three days of rain and temps in the 50s, which caused all kinds of havoc flooding-wise. At one point we had no less than 18 rivers in flood watch or warning, all three mountain passes closed due to avalanches and mudslides, highway 8/101 to the west closed for water and mudslides and then a 20 mile stretch of I-5 south closed due to flooding over the highway. So we were like a little island with no way off unless you were bound for Canada. But within a few days the waters receded and the rain stopped and then came part three of winter: 10 days of fog and freezing temps. Bringing an inversion which held in all the pollutants and made us not only icy but smoggy! Woohoo! Burn bans, the whole thing.

Finally, it's all cleared out now and it's been sunny and chilly for a few days. A very welcome change. We've been teasing each other about trying to identify the huge bright ball in the sky, been so long since we've seen it! Break out the shades...

Lunch with the west coast cousins

Most of Ralph's cousins are in North Dakota and Minnesota, and sadly we don't have the opportunity to see them as often as we'd like.

The cousins here in western Washington are close by, yet we still seem to have a struggle seeing one another, mostly because of conflicting working schedules. I have weekends off, Phyllis works every weekend, Mike has rotating days off. Try and schedule around that!

But today we were able to make a date for lunch and keep it and Phyllis' daughter and grandkids were even able to join us. We met for lunch at Famous Dave's BBQ in Puyallup and had a really yummy BBQ meal while we had a great time catching up with one another.

Vowing to try to make this a more regular thing we are going to try again next month, gathering at our place for lunch. Here's hoping it comes together.

A little more snow...

I think you can officially say we have snow fatigue. Tonight is supposed to be the start of 10 days of rain and temps in the 40s, even some days approaching 50. Yet, when I look out tonight, I see the roads beginning to cover up again and the snow coming down, the wind blowing...bummer. Hopefully, it will warm up tonight and this will all go away.

Ralph's dance of joy!

It is the little things in life and this morning, before it got daylight, Ralph was up doing his dance of joy! Why you ask? Because he heard the garbage truck coming down the road! Our first garbage pickup in three weeks will cause my beloved husband to do his dance of joy. Could the recycling truck be far behind? He was so thrilled to see it come down the road about three hours later.

Now, for this to all happen we had to have about three days of really heavy rainfall to melt the snow off the street enough to have the trucks come down. Overnight last night we had a bit more snow, but just a skiff, so the trucks were still able to come. Yippee!

The heavy snow has damaged a lot of stuff around here besides our roads, which are now filled with potholes. City/county/state budgets that were already strained by the economic problems now have the added burden of snow removal (such as it was) and now filling zillions of potholes.

Plus all three of the state's major east/west highways were closed over the mountains due to heavy snow conditions, including avalanche danger. This last part is a deja vu to last winter. Our passes were closed many days for these reasons last year and they termed it a rare even then. Have to see how the rest of the winter turns out. So far, it's been pretty bad.

As for the other damaged stuff, we are not among the damagees thankfully, our awning roof over our covered patio did fine with the extreme snow load, but many roofs here in our community and around the area didn't fare so well. One of our high schools had a big section of its roof cave in, resulting in an extra week of Christmas break for them. Our neighbor across the street had her patio awning come down. The roof of our clubhouse has damage from the snow and ice (remember the pictures of the icicles??) when it finally did come down it took the rain gutters with it. There is a large stable here that collapsed (no critter injuries) and many others.

It should be cold and another chance of snow overnight tonight and then rain and much warmer temperatures for the next 10 days, maybe even reaching 50 degrees a day or two. While I'll welcome it I have to also remember that with all that rain and warmth comes flooding on all our major rivers.

Winter in Mexico and/or Arizona is looking better and better all the time...