Morning. Tiredness.

On the one hand, I am tired this morning. I got back late from the game last night (I usually start preparing for bed at 10-ish), so being tired seems legitimate: I got less sleep than usual.

But I am not painfully tired. And I'm happy. It rained all night, or at least, every time I was aware of. The wind was really high when we got home, and by the time I was ready for bed and had gotten in, the rain was rattling against the skylight and the roof and the corner of the house.... Now and then in the night, I would stir, and still it would be there.

I woke this morning in the dark to the alarm, let Scott snooze it, pulled my bathrobe back under the covers with me (preferable to warm it up while I still have the comforter over) and listened to the rain. It was really coming down, and just glorious. I love this weather.

It still is, though not as dramatically, but it's time for me to finish getting ready and go to work. I have things to get done - and a pager to take back, since I'm not in a meeting today. (Turns out the 2-3 day meeting that was scheduled, is only 1 day my part, and another 1-2 days designing the back end that the other system will used based on the decisions made in the meeting. We'll have to do that work at some point too, but I thought we were going to have 2-3 days of deciding what we wanted to do. Which is enough to make your eyes cross....)

SNOW!

It is snowing. Snowing, snowing, snowing. In Western Oregon at elevation nothing, before Thanksgiving, it is snowing and sticking to the ground (though no the roadway). Big fat fluffy flakes, and thick, very thick. It's highly impressive and gorgeous.

Also amusing that it's sticking, since the weather report insists that we're still above 40 degrees and are not supposed to get below it all day....

Okay, real snow day!

I just came home. I was midway through the people who bailed; R (who lives in the hills, and whose wife would not be able to drive in this both due to her car and disabilities) and L (who lives far enough away and up that he can be snowed in when we're just wet) bailed first. I chased N (lives on a steep hill) and M (45 minute drive into the country where the roads are never cleared) out pretty closely thereafter. N got home and messaged me that if he'd left any later, he would not have made it into his driveway.

I passed that around the office. We sent an email amounting to "we're not quite closed, but if you can't reach someone, call them at home". My boss bailed next. I had a few tasks to do that are vastly easier with the office tools. I finished those, and bailed.

Q covered the daytime pager for me while I came home, now I'm back on call. It took me about 40 minutes to make what is a 15 or 20 minute drive in clear weather and traffic, and most of that was not the traffic. The highways had been tended and weren't too slick (slushy, but spread too thin and too liquid to really slip). Still, I was under the speed limit most of the way...because the visibility stank. There was water spraying up from the road and heavy amounts of snow falling from the sky. What a combination.

I took the south Wilsonville exit. All my routes home from the north exit involve slopes, sometimes slopes with turns and stop signs (*waves to 65th street) and I didn't want to do that. (Well, not all my routes. I can take a circuitous route that is level, and results in my ending up on the same street the South Wilsonville exit leads to. Thanks, no, I-5 was pretty clear as far as traction, I wasn't so sure of the surface streets.)

The Wilsonville road, once past the shopping center, had a few slush and slip issues. When I got up just shy of the high school, I was doing about 20 (and would have been doing 25 if not for the school zone) when I saw a car. So I slowed further. Good call. He'd been coming the other way and made a left turn, lost control, and slammed a little car (sorta like my Corolla but I didn't catch the make/model) into a high curb; his front bumper was a mess. At least, that's what it looked like. Another car was in the driveway he was trying to turn into, but it looked undamaged, so I think this was a one-car accident with a witness.

There's a center island with bushes there, that ends just before the driveway (in the direction I was going - to him it would have started just after); he'd hit the curb on the far side of the driveway, which gave me enough room to move around him in the center area that's not really a turn lane and go on. If he had swung the other way and hit the curb on the side nearer to me, I would have been trapped, unless I wanted to try to go in reverse down a slushy hill.

Since it looked like everything was okay, I came home. It's very snowy here, and no little slippery. I'll get back to work in a bit, but I'm taking my lunch break now. And taking photographs. I didn't have my camera with me today because I didn't think pouring rain would be very good for photographs even if I do like it. Silly me! I'll take some pictures and then de-snow the bushes and trees. This stuff is wet and heavy.

Other snow thoughts....

...yes, I know. Cope. I'm like a little child about snow, and there is so much of it. The great fat flakes have finally (literally after several hours) become a sifting of small flakes, but a lot of them are sifting down. I want the huge ones back, but oh well. Anyway, snow thoughts:

I had to get a couple inches of snow off my car to come home. Let's not mention how much fun getting into the trunk prior to clearing it off was.

When I turned onto the street that leads to mine, a father was making a snowman with his kids. They didn't have a huge yard, but it had plenty of snow and then some. They'd broken for a snowball fight as I went past.

Partway down I-5, it was just sleet - around Tualatin - then it got all snowy again.

The clouds are low, too, and things in the distance look foggy. It looks very Christmas-postcard-ish. Today's high was supposed to be 57 or 58 (at one am last night) and the low 40 (tonight, becoming tomorrow's high). The weather had other ideas. It was about 34 at the office when I left; it was 33 here when I arrived (according to the car's measurement, which may be off).

I smell of snowmelt just now. It got in my hair. I love that crisp scent.

The second-floor landing at my office has a glass roof. It's bloody dim in there when it's covered over in snow. The stuff is heavy and wet and was not budging off in the least. It had bowed over a sapling tree at work, and was breaking branches off an older one. (Hence my desire to get some of the snow off my trees and bushes, right after taking pictures, which I did in fact do.)

Mother nature is snickering. My maple still had half the leaves on it. It still has a quarter. There were leaves on my lawn because the half of leaves my maple did not have this morning, came down Monday, and it is dark when I get home. I'm very glad it's a small maple but even so, my yard is now lawn, a layer of leaves, snow, a thin layer of leaves, more snow...the rest of the leaves will doubtless jump into the game soon.

I'm sure getting them up after this melts will be a wonderfully thrilling task. Sigh.

But it is so gorgeous now. And now I am going to go find some warm soup.

Snowwwww pictures.

No, I'm not posting them. They came out. They're spiffy. I'll edit them sometime in the next couple days, then post them. :)