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<\/p>\nSo I started Christmas by allowing my computer to suffer a massive heart attack and die, taking with it the logon information for this blog.<\/p>\n
This was, of course, the Greatest Gift of All for people who don\u2019t like this blog.\u00a0 It was also a pleasant break for me, which I used to find another (the awesome HP Envy, featuring Features as well as many parts that do the things I need it to do such as run Word and Outlook and play music and hook up to the interwebz and send stuff to editors and also talk to our speakers and stuff like that.\u00a0 Then on Saturday, I spent the day restoring my files from the cloud wrong and watching a d0cumentary on Bing Crosby because I am basically a Republican at heart, especially at Christmastime.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, we went to Mass right up the street at St. Pius in the m0rning.\u00a0 This allowed us to sleep in a bit, which I appreciated because I was up late struggling with the computer.\u00a0 After that, Jan went and got Angie, a family friend who is afflicted with Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease.\u00a0 The plan was for her to hang out with us Christmas Eve Day and then come to the Children\u2019s Mass at Blessed Sacrament at 5 PM.\u00a0 However, as the the day progressed and I looked in on Facebook, we began to realize that a Christmas Miracle was unfolding western Washington.\u00a0 First, this picture from Lacey, Washington, just south of the Great Train Wreck showed that my brother\u2019s house was indeed getting the first signs of an actual White Christmas:<\/p>\n
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In order to get some perspective on this, understand that Seattle had 11 white Christmases in the entire 20th Century.\u00a0 Our last one was in 2008 and before that it was 1987, if memory serves.\u00a0 So this is a Big Deal.<\/p>\n
As the afternoon wore on, we got bulletins from various people telling us the snow was coming north, first in Ballard, then in Shoreline.\u00a0 We looked out the window at dusk and, sure enough, it was falling in our own back yard.\u00a0 Wondrous!<\/p>\n
And a logistical challenge.\u00a0 Seattleites are completely hopeless in snow.\u00a0 We just close the city.\u00a0 Two inches is sufficient to paralyze all traffic and lead to nightmares in travel.\u00a0 This is because a) Seattle is built on a fjord with ridiculous hills everywhere and b) it has virtually no equipment for dealing with a.\u00a0 Main drags eventually get a plow or salt or gravel.\u00a0 Back streets (meaning \u201cmy entire town\u201d just north of Seattle) not so much. Here is a typical scene of winter driving in the Land of Queen Anne Hill, where the shadows lie:<\/p>\n