Hamsters

I'm right up here less than 200 miles as the crow flies from the Canadian border and people go completely ape at the word "snow" if they live on Puget Sound. The Sound prevents snow from falling much or accumulating much along its shores.

Yet if one drives only 15 miles inland, particularly since the Cascade Range literally lines the Eastern edge of the Sound, in some of the area, (it's a huge fat aneurism of slightly-less-salty-than-the-Pacific-Ocean water with an openings to the Pacific only at its northwest and southwest mouths, the most violent being the former -- the strait of Juan de Fuca) -- and you're in snow up to your armpits. The Cascades trap most of the moisture in the air and snow falls and falls and falls off and on all winter. However, the biggest concentration of human population is down out of the roughest parts of that range and in the foothills and the valleys, all of which pour into Puget Sound.

I live at 1,000 feet altitude, in a town south of Seattle. Parts of Seatle are nearly 1,000 feet altitude. However, drive 14 blocks west of those parts, and you're at the water's edge. That's a thousand foot drop in altitude in under 2 miles.

I'm literally 20 feet below (in altitude) but 200 feet in actual distance from the top of this little ridge.. and here -- for 3 blocks of town property -- we're on the the last ridge of the mountain before the land slopes down to Puget Sound, some 2 miles as the crow flies from our bathroom wall or a right and then a left turn from our front door.

I've been stuck in here on black ice and snow when one can literally slip slide a block on black ice and get onto dry or damp but thawed streets.
I'm right at a point where we can get snow and a block away it'll be raining.

Still, behind me, the ridge drops off into the Green River Valley, and you have to drive another 8 miles before the ridges are back to back going up into the body of the Cascades. There are 3 towns, all surburbs of Seattle, counting the town in which I live, between the Sound and the body of the Cascades.. which are 70 miles dense, before they drop off into Eastern Washington, which is dryer and in summer hotter than the Western part of the state.

In Seattle and suburbs, when people hear the word "snow" on the weather on any Seattle TV station, they react like a huge cage of hamsters into which someone has dropped a pit bull.

Idiots. Squeaking squealing stampede.

When there's going to be snow in Snoqualmie or White pass (the two most travelled high passes inland from Seattle, where there are quite a few ski resorts and thorugh which are the main roads to E. Washington and farm country if one goes DUE east, instead of going south and then turning East) the TV jerks mention it as if it's going to fall IN Seattle and in all these towns right on and along Puget Sound. They posture and mug for the cameras as if it's going to accumulate and stick *in these towns and imply that everyone's going to lose power and -- OMIGOSH, STARVE!

::eyeroll::

Hamsters.

People dash to their cars, haul ass to the nearest stores and empty the shelves; batteries, canned goods, milk, bread, crackers, soup, and toilet paper. Forget lamp oil and wicks or candles or fireplace logs. Those are gone already. They'll buy those huge 24- and 36-roll bales of rolled toilet paper because some talking head on TV said "snow".

Frakking hamsters.