Dearest Philthadelphian Phriends,
One thought, and one thought alone has been dominating our minds the last half-week, and despite the title of this post, it has nothing to do Ben Franklin's nominee for our national symbol. The thought, my friends, is: Why is it so goddamned cold in the Pacific Northwest? Last Friday night it snowed about 4 inches in as many hours, and it was actualy quite pretty when we woke up the next morning:
But since then we've had single digit windchills every single day. Apparently it hasn't been this cold here since the late 80's, and this is more snow than Bellingham has ever received before Thanksgiving. Oh yeah, it's a La Nina winter alright! And, fair enough, we (or at least I) did beg the snow gods to let us have it. Snow, yes please. Thor's frosty windhammer beating down our doors and chapping our brains, no thanks.
Have we brought this cold weather with us from Philadelphia? We couldn't help but notice that it was in the mid fifties there on Friday...but remember what it was like in Philly last year?
And before then, I was in Madison...
...so maybe I brought it with me.
Anyway, the point is, it's cold. And yet, despite the frosty trials and tribulations, we've still managed to have a lot of fun while waiting for our snow tires to be installed. F'rinstance, there's nothing like a couple peanut buster parfaits to warm the insides and shellack one's teef with fudgey goodness:
I guess the only good thing about the cold is that it isn't raining, which causes the effing sunroof on my car to leak onto the passenger seat! The milk-of-human-kindness story here, which will make this a full-circle holiday tale, is that the mechanic not only drove to my work to pick up my car, he left his own car for me to drive while it's being serviced! Talk about collateral! Can you imagine this going on in South Philly? That's just the kind of granola-fueled customer service y'all would expect out here in the PNW, and it really does warm the heart (his seat heaters are better than mine, too).
So now that we have a new car, we're thinking of making a couple Home Depot and plant nursery runs, just to get the really messy, smelly stuff, ya know? The loosely bound 40 pound bags of manure and sand, that kind of thing. Of course, I can't take Michal in a hardware store without her getting all hot and bothered about turning the basement into a terrarium, or a stained glass blowing factory. Sure enough, here she was on Sunday turning the basement mud room into a sewing/beading/denim jacket bedazzling den:
It's going to be fantastico, you'll see. And we hope that you're all excited about bedazzled x-mas gifts!
It's coming up on the night before Thanksgiving, so I'm going to shut this thing down before I have to think of another title. We miss you all! Happy Thanksgiving!
P.S. - We forgot to mention that the Boob once again took to the skies from our back deck. Having mastered tripedalism, she's been looking for new challenges and thought she might give two limbs a go. Instapoll: Should we get her another cat for company, or a parachute?
(In the background, you'll see the vet, trying to get away from us. As an aside, I marched into his office waving xrays and babbling something about how I couldn't really speak spanish (in terrible spanish) and he looked at me, smiled, and calmly said, "No problem - I speak English. I got my degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.")
