Seattle proves once again that it does not have boring weather

I know I begin every post with the mandatory apology for going so long without blogging, and this one will be no exception. So here it is: sorry it's been so long. But once RB leaves the B we'll have much more to blog about and I'll have much more time with which to blog, seeing as how I won't have to deal with the constant complaints from R about her B being too big and crashing into things and weighing her down and making her eat half her weight in chocolate and making crank phone calls to our congressman and developing nuclear weapons. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration - she only eats about a quarter of her weight in chocolate. But after all that is over and with R presumably being distracted keeping B happy and clean and fed I will have much more time to blog.... Well, at least the part about having more to blog about was true.

So we've had another bout of very interesting weather here. Yesterday it started snowing in the middle of the day, but by the time we noticed it had started snowing it was too late to try and plan to leave work early, so we kind of got stuck. We left at our normal time, but about 5 - 10 minutes after pulling out of the parking lot we had not moved at all. So we literally backed up the way we had come, back into the parking lot and parked. We decided to go out to dinner and figured the traffic would be better an hour later. One of the few kosher restaurants in the area is actually right near campus so we walked there. It's the same vegan chinese place that Rachel and I went to for my birthday - the one at which I ordered the food with fennel in it. This time I made a much better choice and got a hot pot, which is basically a cross between a soup and a stew. It was pretty good, with the usual qualification of "for a vegan chinese restaurant."

We walked back to the car about an hour and a half later and put the snow chains on the tires. The traffic was a lot better than when we had tried to leave the first time, and when we got a few miles from campus we realized that the snow chains were a total waste - there was no snow anymore. But we had to limit our speed because of the chains. Then, when we were about 10 minutes from home, we hit a bump in the road and the low rumbling we had been hearing from the chains turned into a something that was like a cross between a grinding and being caught in the crossfire in a gang war - not a comforting noise when you're in the middle of the highway with 8 people in a van. We pulled over to the shoulder, and what had happened was that the chain caught onto some piece of metal in the wheel well and the force had bent it to the point where it was making contact with the wheel. It was a pretty sturdy piece of metal so we couldn't really bend it with our hands and we didn't really have any tools we could have used to bang it back into place, or at least to the point where it wasn't touching the tire. A cop stopped but was not much help - he didn't have any tools either. So we didn't have much choice - we took the chains off and drove home slowly, enduring a pretty horrible grinding noise, although at least with the chains off the gang crossfire noise was gone. Once we got off the highway we saw that seattle actually got quite a lot of snow, at least in our area. It was probably a good 3 inches. Now before you midwesterners scoff and write a comment about how you had to walk to school in 12 feet of snow with nothing but old newspapers on your feet, you have to realize that I can count on one hand the number of snow plows that Seattle owns (in fact, in the couple snow storms we've had so far I have not seen a single plow). So nothing was plowed, and to make matters worse, it's really hilly here. So the last bit of the drive was kind of a nail-biter, to say the least. But we did make it home safely.

Meanwhile, Rachel was skidding all over the road on her way home from her afternoon job and she was too afraid of skidding down the hill by our house, so she just parked our car a couple blocks away and walked home. I picked it up on my way to shul this morning.

So today, since we had no van and I wasn't about to take the car to work, I worked from home. But for some reason my usually speedy remote access was really slow today and I kept getting disconnected. So my major accomplishment for today was taking a really good nap. And I guess I can add to that the fact that I posted to the blog.

There isn't much other exciting news here, but for those of you who are hungry for some pictures I do have some news on that front. We bought a video camera and I got the DV cable you need to download the video to the computer (advertisement: the BEST place by far that I have found for every kind of cable under the sun is monoprice.com - the cable was $5, including shipping), so we may start putting up some videos. There is nothing much interesting to tape now, but in a couple months there just may be... But until then, I'm thinking that once our place is suitably clean we will do a video tour!

Speaking of the cleanliness of our place, we ended up deciding not to put in new cabinets, which is a whole story that I don't want to really get into right now. Suffice it to say, we called a cabinet guy who was recommended to us and he treated us like dirt so we decided to put in some free-standing shelves from The Container Store instead. So not only did we save a bunch of money by not putting in cabinets, but we got the shelves for about half price because we bought the floor models. Yay!

That is all from here. We are really looking forward to Abba, Pat, Cham, and Dov's visit! We just got a brand new trundle bed set so there will be beds for all! No sleeping on the floor for you.

Hope to see you all soon.
Ari