Monday: Buried Car Edition

This weekend it snowed like Portland is supposed to rain in the winter -- steadily and for days. We are just lucky to have gobs of the stuff because of the freakishly low temperatures. It hasn't gotten above 25 in three days. This morning I looked out our living room window and saw a lot of cars that have been partially buried from the the weather over the course of two days. In the case of Irving Street, this particular car has been covered by fallen snow, not snow pushed over from a plow. Plows have not touched the side streets.

As far as snow accumulation goes, we had 6 inches by Saturday and freezing rain dropped all night, so by Sunday there was about a 1/2 inch of ice on top of everything. Yesterday afternoon it snowed pretty hard, adding another 2 inches or so, and judging from the trees and our windowsills, I'd say we got another 2-3 inches last night. So that puts us in the neighborhood of 9-12 inches over the course of the weekend.

The snow crunches when you walk on it and shoots out giant icebergs wherever you step. Both Jesse and I were pretty tired of staring at each other yesterday afternoon and decided to go take a walk and check out the rest of the city. In my experience last week, our neighborhood tended to be a little worse (snow-wise) than the rest of the city. We stopped at the car first to ogle the accumulation and played around a bit with the giant sheets of ice.

I was wrong, the rest of the city looked pretty much like our neighborhood. However, we weren't the only ones walking around. The Pearl district had quite a few people out and about, shopping in the stores that decided to open in the afternoon. I think everyone was outside to witness this freak weather. Also, for many people, I think they woke up and thought "Oh Shit!" realizing that Christmas is a mere 3 days away. The snow falling was quite pretty on our walk.

Interstate-405, on the other hand, was very not pretty. It was caked with just about as much snow as the rest of the streets in town. Let's hope that they got some plows and salt trucks out there last night. There were definitely cars driving down the highway, but it was pretty slow going -- even for the giant 4-wheel drive trucks.

Last night we decided that if there was any hope of us getting out of here to drive down to Santa Cruz for Christmas that we'd have to clean off the car and shovel out the wheels. We borrowed a snow shovel from our apartment building and went to work after dinner. It took about an hour, but I feel pretty confident that it gave us a fighting chance of getting our car out of it's parking spot should a patch of good weather permit us to leave.