Our unusual weather

My entire life, I've lived in parts of the country that get lots of winter snow. I lived in NE Ohio for the first 21 years of my life, where we were close enough to Lake Erie to get lake effect snow. While blizzards aren't exactly common there, they do happen. In fact, there was a blizzard that hit Ohio between January 25 and 27 of 1978...think it's a coincidence that I was born on October 27, 1978? (Do the math....) ;)

For the last 8 years, I've lived in Colorado. Denver itself gets an average of approximately 60 inches of snow a year. However, I spent the last 5 years living in Evergreen, which is actually about 2000 feet higher in elevation than Denver...so the average snowfall there is more like 90 inches a year. 2 years ago today, we actually had a "small" blizzard that dumped about 3 feet of snow in Evergreen.

When we decided to move to the Seattle area, one thing that I was excited about was not having to drive in snow...Seattle only has an average annual snowfall of 8.6 inches. I do enjoy snow; I just don't like driving in it. So I've been a bit confused this week. Last Saturday, we got snow. See my post from a few days ago...when no one came to my book club because it had snowed the night before. We didn't get anymore after Saturday night, but the local schools had 2-hour delayed starts on both Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, schools were closed. Nope, it hadn't snowed yet. They were concerned that the snow would make driving difficult when school was dismissing.

Sure enough, it did snow on Wednesday. I think we got about 4 or 5 inches that night. Schools were also closed on Thursday. And Friday. When I went to my volunteer shift on Thursday night, the store actually closed at 6:00 because of the weather. And Shawn tried to do a little Christmas shopping last night, but discovered that the store had closed at 5:00 because of the weather. Today, we decided to order pizza for lunch. Papa John's wasn't delivering because of the weather. Now keep in mind...it hasn't snowed a single flake since Wednesday night. It took Pizza Hut an hour and a half to bring us our pizza, and the delivery woman told me that they have "cut off" our area now for deliveries because of the hill that the drivers have to come up to get to us.

Now I do understand that this area isn't accustomed to treating the roads, so there has been ice all over for days now. I'm just not used to hearing people freak out after getting a few inches of snow. Tonight, they're calling for more snow. This time, though, there's supposed to be a lot of wind with it. It's my understanding that that's the thing to worry about...high winds knocking out power. So if you don't get any blog posts for a few days and I don't answer any emails or facebook messages, that probably means that we don't have power and therefore don't have internet access. Wish us luck! :)