Greg

Another season completed

No, not a season of the year (though we aren't that far away from officially entering winter - just a few weeks left), my dodgeball league's season is done for the year.  Today was the first round of the playoffs and we got knocked out in a pretty competitive match.  Personally, I played pretty crappy but still had at least one catch and got a couple people out, so at least that's something...

I wasn't too sure what to expect when I started playing, but it turned out to be a lot of fun.  And very painful.  No, it's not that getting hit with a foam ball is very painful, but dodgeball is painful in a "wow, when was the last time I used X-muscle in this way" kind of pain - you really do duck, dodge, dip, doge - and throw.  Oh, the throwing.  You'd think I would have learned by the last week of the season that I should properly stretch and warm up my arm...  Nonetheless, here I am with a sore arm wishing I had taken a few more minutes of throws before we started.

Now on to tennis season!

Next ice-age has reached Seattle - film at eleven

Wow, it's either been a really slow news week, or the local TV/Radio news reporters don't understand the gravity of the recent snow situation.  Coverage over the past couple days has been a bit extreme at best.  Case in point?  The news reports a couple mornings ago were warning people to not leave the house unless they had to.  Seriously - it's not like a blizzard came through and you'd die just by walking out of your front door.  Roads were passable if you drove at a reasonable pace - OK, it helped a lot as well if your route didn't include steep un-sanded hills.

It seems like that's been the real problem - it's not that we've had such a tremendous amount of snow and ice that roads should be impassable, it's that the roads haven't seen enough sand, salt, de-icer, snow-plows, etc.  Now, the question is which is more fiscally responsible?  Allowing for one-off losses of productivity and repair work (downed lines, crashed cars, etc.) or paying for a proper fleet of plows and sand trucks?  Probably we're better off just succumbing to mass hysteria every few years.

Side note - we did finally break the all-time record for precipitation in one month during this wintery wintery blast.

Snow! No, really, snow.

There was a strange sight while looking from the window of my office this afternoon.  When?  Oh, you know, around the start of rush hour...  Snow!  Yep, snow. 

Actually, it's been snowing off and on throughout the day.  It was just a little disheartening to see it start back up right before we were about to head home.  Strangely - this was by far one of the best drives home.  No, it certainly wasn't the quickest - but it was by far the sanest that I've seenpeople around here drive home.  People were actually leaving space between themselves and the car ahead of them.  And driving at a reasonable speed. 

This is all in stark contrast to normal Seattle traffic where it's a regular occurence to for people to be reading on the way into work.  While driving.  Something about seeing the person who's driving next to you splitting their time between looking at the road and looking at the book in their lap is just a bit disturbing and makes you want to put as much distance as possible between the two of you. 

Can we have more snow now?

November catch-up

Well, it's been about three and a half weeks since the last post - I'm pretty sure that's not the longest drought this page has seen but haven't actually gone back to check.  Between work, taking care of some stuff around the house, and a couple of trips out of town - there's been a bunch going on that will be fodder for future posts (with pictures to be uploaded and whatnot :))...

Today's fun fact - there's been 12.78 inches of rain in the Seattle area since the last time I posted.  Wow - that's a lot of rain.  For November alone, we've already broken the all-time record for November (done half-way through the month) and are on track for breaking the all-time rain record for any month.