First Snow

Today there was snow in Seattle. I haven't experienced snow in over 5 years, ever since I left NYC. While I think the virgin snow on the ground and trees is quite beautiful, I definitely don't miss walking through the sludge and the ice.

What's funny is how different your perspective can be if it is your first experience. My girlfriend lived in Southern California all her life, so she never has really experienced snowfall like this. She really seemed to enjoy it ... that was until this morning.

She woke me up this morning asking for the password to my work computer. I was groggy, so I didn't know why on earth she was asking for it. Was she a corporate spy? Was she going to try and hack in to commit corporate espionage and steal all of my company's secrets? I asked her why on earth she needed to know and she explained she needed to e-mail work because she couldn't make it in (our home computer doesn't work with her company's webmail). She then informed me that my company's campus was closed for the day. That got my attention and I got up to see what was going on.

It turns out that Seattle can't deal with snow very well. I guess it doesn't happen often enough for them to have good infrastructure to deal with it. When I was in NY and NJ, I would expect the streets to be clear and salted down by the morning. It was perfect safe to drive, as the streets were cleared well before it was time to go to work. Not the case in Redmond.

I even tried to get into work in the afternoon, expecting most of the ice to be clear off of the roads. Still not. At one point, on a hill, I hit the gas and my tires spun for a few seconds before they gripped and allowed me to move on.