Travel plans changed

By the time this gets posted we had planned on being in Spokane with Melody's sister Celeste, but weather has changed plans. It would have been a slow drive over the pass, and we would have needed to turn around the next day and head back to Seattle. Instead, she'll sometime after the 1st, after travel is more sane.

While we now have a couple unplanned days at home, that doesn't mean we've been idle. I did some baking today, and yesterday we finished up holiday cards and packaged some presents to send in the mail. Melody's taken the opportunity to get a few more hours of work in, but I haven't since I'm taking the whole week as vacation.

Snow in front yard

We started getting some melting yesterday but more snow fell last night, so this is how things looked this morning. Our car is pretty typical of vehicles which haven't been moved since the storms started last week. It's hard to tell in this picture, but our street is mostly compacted snow. The arterials are better; a couple days ago they were bare and dry, yesterday bare and wet, and today they're a bit slushy.

While we haven't been driving around, we've been walking around (to the store, Post Office, etc.) and Melody's made it downtown to work a couple of the days. Last Thursday I met her down there at the Web Collective and the eight of us went out looking for a place to eat.  After sliding around 8 or 10 blocks, we ended up across the street from where we started! But they were open and had good food, so everything worked out great.

While out and about near home, we've been trying out the Internet connectivity of several places near us. While some of the cafés seem to do fine, at times they can be spotty. The library has surprisingly good connectivity. The cafés generally are password-protecting their access, which seems reasonable; they either post the password are more than happy to give it to you when you buy something.

There are a few grocery stores that we generally walk to, and while they've had a good number of shoppers, they aren't completely crammed. The busiest one I saw was a couple days ago the QFC had each line open with shoppers 3 or 4 deep. Today, however, I didn't have much of a wait.

We haven't seen this much snow since 1996, but that year we had a lot of snow and then the next day it rained, causing flooding problems. Before that, 1990 was a big snow year. While we didn't mov from California until 1991, we came here to visit family. I remember being told that perhaps someone would be able to get me at the airport. I know exactly how Celeste felt when we told her we weren't sure about how we would get her from the airport had she come last night!