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Let it snow!
Oh yeah. That’s right. I said SNOW!
I love snow – have ever since I was a little kid. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to go to school (I liked school); but I love being out in the snow.
Now that I’m grown up it’s still magical. Sure I need to shovel the driveway. Sure it’s a pain in the arse to put on chains. Sure there are lots of idiots out there who don’t know how to act in the snow. But it’s still fun!
It started snowing about 2p yesterday afternoon while we were in North Bend doing some shopping. Kaitlyn loved seeing the snowing coming down. As an added bonus we got to see the “Santa Train” on the move as we were driving home in the blowing snow. Now if that doesn’t say “Happy Holidays” I don’t know what does!
Unfortunately Kaitlyn was up through the afternoon so she didn’t go down for her nap until about 3:45p. We woke her up about 7p so we could go outside in the snow for a bit. It was still snowing and Kaitlyn loved walking around in the falling snow (there was about 3-4 inches on the ground) and looking at all the Christmas lights. It was blowing hard though, so it was pretty cold. We didn’t stay out for long.
Now through all this I kept looking at the weather reports, etc. (yes, I admit I’m a weather geek) because I am drumming this weekend at church. So I was trying to decide whether to drive to Bellevue Saturday night and crash on someone’s couch, or sleep in my own bed and slog it in the morning. I finally decided on the latter.
This morning at 4:30a I woke up and peeked out the window … there’s 10-12 inches of snow on the ground – much higher in drifts and were our city’s plow drivers decide to leave their deposits. Why can’t these guys clear out the entrances to the alleys?!? After a few minutes of maneuvering to get out of our driveway I had to blow through a 2+ foot snow bank at the end of our alley. GRR.
Anyway, I made it in just fine. And it’s still snowing up there. LOVELY! Here’s the view from our front room this morning.
I wonder how much more snow will fall today before it changes to rain. Then comes flooding over the next few days with a couple more storms coming in from the Pacific. Oh – and don’t forget the expected wind storm. Tis the season!
Really? I disagree.
“Dallas is looking a lot like Seattle these days,” says Ed Stoddard of Reuters in this evening’s story about the flooding happening in Texas.
In Marble Falls near the state capital, Austin, several people were rescued from the tops of their vehicles and even from trees after nearly 20 inches of rain came down in a matter of hours in the latest downpour.
Yeah, so it doesn’t do that here. If Seattle gets a heavy downpour like I was used to in the South people completely freak out. In fact, according to the Seattle Mayor’s Office, 20 inches of rain is more than half of our annual rainfall (36.2 inches). Chicago, Washington D.C., and NYC all get more annual rain than we do here.
Sure, we probably have more rainy days, but most of those are a gentle shower or heavy mist, and they sunny in the afternoon.
But if people keep thinking it rains all the time in Seattle, that’s fine with me. They can stay away we those of us intrepid worshipers of the rain can enjoy our beautify views of the mountains on cloudless sunny afternoons!
TechEd day 3
OK – I was officially out way too late last night. I was dragging today. Blah. At least I made it to breakfast at the convention hall though.
Session 1: PowerShell Scripting for Exchange 2007. WOW! I’m actually pretty excited about how much you can do from a command line to manage Exchange 2007. The ability to make mass modifications in a scripted fashion will revolutionize how IT pros manage Exchange. A month ago it took a coworker the better portion of a day to go through hundreds our user accounts and remove an email address for a specific domain from all but a handful. Could have been done in a couple minutes with PowerShell.
Session 2: Top 10 Enhancements in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. Sounds sexy, doesn’t it? I thought it was a great session. They’re continuing to improve on a critical enterprise component of the server platform. I’m most happy to see them completely overhaul the management interface. HURRAY!
Session 3: Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange. Seems like they’ve done a good job upgrading the Antigen product. I look forward to running this in our environment, especially since CA doesn’t feel like supporting Exchange 2007.
After that? I skipped the late afternoon session (I can get the info online) and the evening session (nothing I wanted to go to anyway) and went back to the hotel to sleep. I feel SO much better now.
I was hoping to walk across the parkway to Disney Downtown Marketplace and get a good dinner and do some gift shopping. Unfortunately the weather decided to break the Florida drought with a long train of thunderstorms and downpours. So I slept some more. Another night of bland hotel food.
Better luck tomorrow … or Friday.
Nathan's Occasional Blog 