How did it get to be December already? Sheesh, this year has gone by fast.

For those of you who haven't seen this delightful bit of local news yet:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/401779_schene28.html

Unbelievable. And you know this self-control-challenged, vicious, child-beating, drunk-driving sorry excuse for a human being is going to get off with a slap on the wrist, as usual in cases of egregious police brutality. We need some violence-based equivalent to the sex-offender registry to keep worms like this from ever again getting a job that would put them near kids. At least when they fly off the handle, then, it'd be a fairer fight.

And if this is how he treats kids in public, how do you think he treats his own?

Well, we made it through the closing, despite several last-minute near-disasters due to the stupidity of the banking industry and their willingness to lie through their teeth about their policies (Scary thing -- my bank will now not even let me deposit my payroll check without holding it for several days! And you have no idea how difficult it was to move down payment money around a week and a half before the closing and have it get there in time, even between two accounts at the same bank! Incredible...I thought they wanted people to take these foreclosed homes off their books.) I haven't even tried to post, I've been such an emotional mess. It doesn't help that I'm doing three people's jobs at work at the moment and on top of that, am now training at least two people over the upcoming weeks. X_x I think I can now say I am qualified to manage an office.

But David has the keys in-hand in Minneapolis, and we lucked out in that they left the fridge and washing machine behind, so that saves us some immediate trouble. I can finally file our taxes and get that taken care of. And apparently the final appraisal put the place at a conservative $160,000, so we're not in danger of being underwater on this any time soon. ^_^ Now I just have to make it through the next two months here in Seattle and get all the moving garbage taken care of. ::deep breath::

Craigslist is trying to kill me. If I see one more awesome deal for things I will need in two months on the Minneapolis CL, and which due to the First Law of Internet Deals, I will never be able to find at the time I'm actually looking for them, my head may explode.

Bah! I will have a comfy microsuede couch if I have to trap, kill, and skin the Synthetic Couch Beasts myself to do it! And I will be the proud owner of my very own washing machine and dryer set, which will not shock us or catch on fire or flood the garage like the ones we are stuck with at this rental.

Actually, a related question: does anyone know where you'd buy those concrete-pouring forms that are used by construction companies to make columns? I have a project in mind that will require the ones with at least 12-18" diameter.

In Seattle? Search #seatst on Twitter to check out the community effort to provide updates on snow, roads, and bus conditions (and if you're on Twitter, tag your related posts #seast). WSDOT also has great real-time updates about conditions.

If ONE MORE PERSON tells me Seattle doesn't have to plan for winter weather because it has hills, I am going to beat them over the head with a piece of ice inscribed with a topographical map of Duluth. The only difference is that when you get to the bottom here, you go SPLASH instead of THUNK.

The Fargo Microsoft campus is apparently making fun of the Redmond campus quite a bit for the hullabaloo. You can read that at http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/12/22/9244583.aspx -- it's hilarious.

Seriously, though, it's utterly insane here right now. You'd think we had had a natural disaster from the way the entire metro area is crippled. They won't salt because a day or two of salt once a DECADE might kill all the fish in the Sound (my favorite comment from the paper's website said, "But, wait, if all that salt washes into the Sound, won't it just make the salmon even tastier?"); they won't plow because it might hurt the roads (which makes NO SENSE because they are telling everyone to use chains, and they are leaving all the ice on the roads to expand and contract in the cracks and break up the asphalt). They have...wait for it...rubber plow blades. Which are running several inches off the ground. Intentionally. You know, to pat the snow nicely on the head and give it a lollipop and ask it to lie down and go to sleep and be good now. Nice snow! Happy snow! Everyone be happy even though you haven't been able to go to work and get paid or buy groceries or see a doctor or get a cop to come when you have an accident or FOR GOD'S SAKE GET BOOZE WE NEED MORE BOOZE WISCONSIN PLEASE HELP US YOU WERE RIGHT! WE'LL TRADE YOU COFFEE!!! 8DDD

Ahem. At least I have booze. I learned something in college in the Great White North.

Ah, well. Better get to bed so I can be prepared for my four hour Russian-roulette style commute tomorrow. The area's transit agencies are instituting a new adverse weather policy, where you go out and stand on a random city corner and light some incense, and if you are lucky a bus, a sleigh pulled by reindeer, or else a trick with four-wheel-drive will show up and you'll be able to get to work.

A NOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU IN THE SEATTLE AREA: Announcements yesterday indicated that the regional blood banks are already dangerously low -- and this is before the current storm and usual Christmas slowdown in donations. Please, please, please go donate blood if you can do so safely, and spread the word. Locations are listed here: http://www.psbc.org/home/index.htm. I have a pretty severe needle phobia myself, but we went yesterday anyway, because it's important. If you can't do it in the next few days, call for an appointment and go later in the week.

---

Ah, getting reading for Snowmageddon 2008 -- there is nothing quite like Seattle in a snowstorm. This year's popular excuse for why the city only has 20 snow plows and no effective plan to deal with winter weather is that unlike absolutely everywhere in the Midwest, where it is utterly and completely flat (and, presumably, where road salt falls from the trees and the roads melt the ice as if by magic), Seattle has hills, which exempt it from dealing with snow and ice.

At which point residents of Duluth, Bayfield, large portions of Michigan, and Northeastern Indiana laughed so hard their beer-and-cheese-infused hearts gave out, and their surviving relatives voiced support for a reality-TV comedy show based on Seattlites' delusions of the big scary world beyond the Cascades.

This year has been particularly entertaining as the usual city shut-down and wild-eyed panic has been compounded by transit agencies' complete incompetence at dealing with any weather that isn't rain, near-catastrophes involving charter buses, icy cobblestone streets, and dangling over a major interstate, and actual cold weather accompanying a storm. With another storm coming tonight and a power grid that ordinarily fails when someone sneezes too hard, the utility companies have basically forecast major power outages. Though we have been reassured that they are importing crews from Canada because they're real good at dealing with ice and snow. xD As of two days ago, even the Seattle papers were laughing at how pathetically phobic of winter weather the city is. (There was a hilarious article mocking this and consulting Minneapolis residents for their view on this much snow and these temperatures.)

So, of course, with all the news outlets calling this storm "deadly" and tearing out their hair in anticipation of the boundless and unspeakable natural atrocities soon to be visited upon us, people freaked the hell out and stormed the stores today, purchasing lots of fossil fuels to burn so they can die of carbon monoxide poisoning when the lack of cell phones and cable TV gets to be too much for them. They cleared the shelves of true necessities, like frozen pizzas, and braved the treacherously unplowed and icy roads to descend upon the malls in huge numbers. Presumably they have gotten tired of sledding down Queen Anne hill on cardboard boxes and snowboarding down Holgate (no joke) while they skipped work for the last three days and have finally realized they have no flashlights, fresh water, radios, blankets, or wood. (My boss, of course, calls three times a day from his Caribbean vacation to cross-check employees' accounts of who made it to work so he has materials for his Shit List when he returns. Not that we had any business, or that anyone gets paid for any of this time off.)

We stopped at Wal-Mart last night on the way home from work to pick up a few extra water jugs to shore up our supplies (we are not taking any chances that Seattle's slipshod emergency management will maintain water, electric, or any other basic utilities) and saw multiple people leaving with carts completely filled with antifreeze. What they thought they were going to do with this, I don't know, but I'd love to hear the stories behind it ("I'll pour it on my driveway! I'm a genius!" or perhaps "If we mix it with vodka and take shots, we won't freeze to death! I saw it in a chain email I got at work; the Russians do it all the time!"). In the process we discovered that many stores in this area don't ever carry snow shovels, that no one thought to stock up on salt in advance of several concurrent winter storms (including the cities and towns that theoretically maintain the roads), and that the only thing that could potentially make us scared to go to Hell is if it were like a Seattle-area Wal-Mart just before Christmas on the day before a major snowstorm.

I'd find all this a bit amusing, if I wasn't likely to lose pay I need because people won't go to work, and if people weren't probably going to die from all the stupidity.

Stay tuned to find out if we survive the massively catastrophic 6-8 inches of snow and 35mph winds, folks. xD And for those of you in the Midwest and New England dealing with real winter storms, best of luck.

Well, my hometown finally got walloped by a confirmed tornado.

I say "finally" because with the number of times as a child that I ran shrieking for the basement with my family, clutching my plastic Crayola bank and stuffed dog and hoping the big black spinning thing in the sky across the street would take me to Cedar Point instead of a land filled with oddly-dressed screechy midgets, statistically it was only a matter of time. I say "confirmed" because a small tornado did actually touch down while I was in high school (and was, ironically enough, on vacation fleeing other tornadoes along an Ohio highway), but apparently it has since reached adulthood and its records have been sealed, because everyone seems to think this is the first since the 60s.

Fortunately, everyone I know and their families are all right. (Unfortunately, the awful people I hate are as well, but you can only ask for so much, I guess.) My parents were missed by a little over a mile and a half. My aunt's house was missed by the width of a four-lane road. However, since this particular aunt is married to an uncle who still buys in quantities larger than what Costco keeps on hand and stocks his basement for the eventuality of a nuclear war, I'm sure they'd have been fine hunkered down for months either way.

Now, when you look at the pictures, this thing really did a number on the town. There are houses that look like they've imploded, roofs sheared off, gigantic centuries-old trees uprooted, and all the usual hallmarks of tornadoes. It was an EF2, which means it was large enough to generate deadly projectiles and gratuitous comparisons to freight trains, but not big enough for a made-for-TV movie. Given all the devastation, you would expect people to huddle around, shell-shocked, muttering, "Thank god it hit one street over and I still have my house!" or "Well, we lost our trees, but at least my family is all right," or at the very least, "Woo-hoo! Insurance is going to pay me to remodel my shitty Griffith house!" but this is northwest Indiana, so you would be wrong.

I logged onto the website of the local toilet-paper substitute of a newspaper (seriously, this thing has been, over the years, one step up from the Weekly World News in terms of journalism, but it's what they've got) to be kept up to date on the situation on Tuesday, the day after the storm. By this point, I found out that they were having issues getting emergency vehicles through the streets of Munster due to wandering doughnut-seekers (no joke!), that they'd called out the National Guard to quell the near-instantaneous looting in north Griffith, that people were already bitching that their power wasn't back on yet (my parents had theirs back on that same morning, so the power companies must have really called out the reserves), and that people were already angrily squabbling over the fact that the destroyed Griffith neighborhoods were getting more news-time than the trees that were down on their streets. (Which is even stranger if you consider that this is probably the only non-Detroit-related area of the country where a tornado going through has the potential to actually raise property values. Just think -- if you were lucky, it could've taken out at least half a dozen strip club billboards and the meth lab across the street! Or you could've done it and blamed it on the storm!)

Again, I shit you not.

Appalled, I and several others posted some fairly friendly comments trying to explain that power is restored on an as-needed basis (so if you're down the street from a hospital, or if only one tree fell in your area of the power grid and moving it will restore power to tens of thousands of people at once, yours will probably be turned on more quickly,) and that perhaps at the moment the time was better spent being glad one didn't lose one's home and family, or helping neighbors, than fruitlessly bitching that the 18 hour days the power company guys were working to get things going again just weren't good enough.

I won't bore you with the whole wanktastic aftermath of these comments, but some of the delightful highlights were when someone said that losing a fridge full of food was equivalent to losing one's house, so therefore whining was justified (my condolences to those of you in NWI, as I had not realized food inflation had reached one trillion percent over the past few months), when someone suggested in all seriousness that the lack of power meant old people were probably dying in their homes (The Weather Channel reported the local temperature at the time as 75 degrees with no heat index -- a temperature, I'm sure, that an old person living in the Midwest has NEVER experienced the likes of!), and it was suggested I take my "beannie" and latte and go hug a tree, and something about how floods from years ago meant I was riddled with bad karma. I don't know, my brain has a lowered tolerance for idiocy since I've left The Region, and besides, I haven't had a latte in two hours so I can't quite think straight.

It did bring to mind all our close calls through the years, though. Mom said this tornado blew up so fast that even she was caught off-guard, which is really something since years of living with me turned her into my apprentice Neurotic Weather Nut and she can usually give better forecasts than people at the weather service. (Seriously, how many people's mothers would, when asked about the storm, say something like, "Yeah, I checked the Doppler on my cell phone while we were huddled in the basement, and I've never seen a bow echo that big, which must be why it blew in so fast..."?) They had mere minutes to get into the basement before it hit out of a completely innocuous looking cloudy sky -- even weirder, since these things generally come at the back end of severe storms -- and they only had that much warning because they live less than a hundred feet from the town's tornado sirens, which many people couldn't hear at all on account of the extreme wind. I only recall one other storm coming in like that, and I watched the wind on that occasion jump from calm to nearly 80 mph in seconds, so I imagine this was similar. (On that occasion, my sisters had the good fortune to be in the pool, of all places, when the sirens went off, and I swear to god I still saw Dad wince when they ran in the back door with grass stuck to their wet legs.)

It used to be that during severe storms, my family would huddle in the basement with a radio and flashlights and pillows, with me trying to remember which side of the basement debris would accumulate in, my siblings threatening to kill each other before the tornado did, and Mom and Dad taking turns at the back door watching for a funnel cloud (which makes little sense, since they always formed out front!). The neighbors, of course, would be waving gaily from their second-story back deck as the sirens blared. If it was nighttime, Mom would predictably yell at me for being up watching the weather radar when she snuck down to check the weather radar, and if it was afternoon, Dad would run outside under the giant-hail-spitting greenish-boob-cloud-filled sky to save the $20 charcoal grill. Ah, memories.

This was only while we were at home, though. I am convinced we hold some kind of world record for close encounters with tornadoes and tornado-strength straight line winds on vacation. This is how I found out that Webster, Indiana has a better weather radar system than NASA, that if a tornado descends on top of you between the two lanes of a divided highway, only people on one side will have the rolled-up awnings ripped off their campers as they drive down the road, that if a tornado goes through your campground, you will not necessarily have warning of any kind except that the six foot prairie grass behind your tent is suddenly flat against the ground (that was the moment when my brother had his head under a sleeping bag wailing that we were all going to die, and that my mother tersely replied, "Maybe, but first you're going to shut the hell up and eat your dinner!"), that if you are the water-park at Cedar Point when one hits, you get the hell down the slides and hide in the showers, and that the wooden roller coasters in Cedar Point can, in fact, withstand hurricane-force winds.

If none of that is exciting enough for you, we also discovered that our camper was not an amphibious vehicle in a flash flood in rural West Virginia that had to be seen to be believed.

If course, by now Mom has these things down to a science. Every time there's going to be severe weather, my Dad goes upstairs to take a shower (It's apparently a family tradition to be clean when they take you to the morgue -- but seriously, I will sometimes get phone calls when someone will say, "It started hailing the other day, and Dad wasn't even in the shower! It was weird!"), Mom turns into the Pied Piper and lures all four cats down to the basement where the fat diabetic ones will mew for and get a treat, and then remembers that she doesn't know where the hell the kids are (this time, the answer for one was "huddled in a bathroom in a house with no basement, hoping for a quick death"), and my sister rolls her eyes so mightily at the storm that you'd expect them to glow white and start the clouds rotating overhead.

Some things never change.

::sigh:: Come on, Lake County, get on with it. >_< You're making me even more embarrassed to be from there...

My mother is extremely amused that they keep saying that "Obama got the white women in Indiana". She's fairly sure that is making all the white supremacists shit themselves. xD (I do not overstate the racism of my home state...there are seriously still LARGE, well attended, frequent KKK rallies even in the northern part of the state.)

Dad pointed me toward this gem from back home: Dumbest. Politician. Ever.

God, people are assholes sometimes.

Yet another really good occasion for capital punishment.

I'm thinking "firing squad" might be the appropriate method here.

My cat is a freak.

Things we cannot get my cat to eat:
• Chicken, cooked or raw
• Tuna sashimi
• Salmon, cooked or raw
• Milk or cream of any kind
• Bacon
• Steak

Things my cat absolutely loves to the point of delirium:
• Oranges




• Bread crumbs

Bread crumbs. She will not eat good cat food, she turns her nose up at good people food, but cut a loaf of bread and leave the cutting board out, and she will be happily licking it up for half an hour. We put out a little bowl of pre-packaged bread crumbs just to make sure we weren't insane, and I don't think I've ever seen such a happy cat.

I always end up with the weird animals. xD

Well my nasty Metro story made it into The Stranger's "Last Days" column this week. Hooray? xD I almost never ride the #49 bus, either, so what are the odds? Given this week's column, I may never ride that particular route again. I didn't think anything could be worse than the #358, but apparently I was wrong.

Work was almost fun today. The morning was the usual boring drudgery, but just as I got back from lunch, the power went out for over an hour, and we had a seven person guerrilla Nerf gun war in the darkened warehouse. xD I found a good sniping position and got the accountant in the throat, scaring the shit out of him in the process. >=D w00t! (Have I mentioned our warehouse manager rocks?)

I have been largely absent from the intarwebs lately due to unusual levels of exhaustion and hanging out with people in real life, which is even more exhausting. I assume once we have more daylight, I will feel more motivated to do something other than sleep. Otherwise I'll have to start taking my Starbucks intravenously.

I'm scheming about building some kind of platform loft bed because I'm tired of all the space in my room being taken up by furniture. However, as I have a low drop ceiling and a horribly configured room (the closet door is on the wall opposite the entrance, on the opposite side...the corner to the left of the entrance has very little clearance before a window with an electric heater under it...and the corner opposite the entrance, the only other one without a door, is at a very small angle!), this is going to be challenging. I have basically three options:

1. A standard loft, which in my room means I'll never be able to sit up in bed again.
2. A four and a half foot high loft, which gives me just enough space to sit in my desk chair under it, but I'll have to roll out to avoid hitting my head.
3. A high platform bed with bookshelves around the sides and storage accessible from the top (I have a Japanese futon, so accessing that's not really a problem, but that doesn't alleviate the furniture issue, just gives me extra storage).

I'm leaning toward the second option, because I think it's the most stable and the easiest to build (making sturdy bookshelves isn't hard at all, and if I ever don't need the loft, I can just use the bookshelves). What I'm wondering is how much center support I'll need if I have a bookshelf at either end and a platform on top. I'm anticipating about four feet of space between the bookshelves in the middle. Obviously it needs to be sturdy enough to hold a bit of weight. Hmm...

Anyone ever built one of these? If so, I'm especially curious as to how you built the portion that held the bed (Like what kind of wood -- did you go with plywood or slats? That sort of thing) and whether you just supported it at the ends or went with a U-shaped design.

...The last Freecycle digest offered a medical exam table, a drill, and a box for organizing slides. If the next one offers plastic wrap, I'm leaving Seattle.

xD

Or, you know, suggesting names. Either way.

EDIT: Aaaaand the next one contained a cordless saw. Guess that's one way to deal with the evidence. xDDD

...A friend at work lent me the first season of Dexter...OMG AWESOME. O_O Soooo much love for that show. How had I not heard about that by now with the kind of company I keep? xD

More later, gotta go downtown for library volunteering now. xD

Okay, this is interesting enough to merit reposting. Maybe some of you didn't see it on the AS comm, or maybe you know someone who's not on LJ who might be interested: aspieSocial

Oh my god the funny. xD Someone on the Asperger's community posted a thread about some bullshit Christian "ZOMG JEEBUS WILL CURE YOUR AUTISM!!" idiocy (it prominently featured the phrase "Join us as we strive to turn Autism into AWE-tism!", HAHAHA), and silverspar's comment was:

I like being an "Indigo Child" better. Moon Prism Power!

*snerk*

Just out of curiosity -- at a typical sit-down restaurant, what percentage do you usually tip? And where you live, do servers get paid at least minimum wage, or less?