More Snow

Today is actually more pleasant weather than yesterday. Instead of light snow and biting cold and ice, we have lots and lots of snow. But just snow. It's below freezing, but not bitter cold, and while hard-packed snow is unpleasant to drive on, it *isn't* ice and you *can* drive on it, even up and down hills. Although going down hills is best done *very carefully*.

Which reminds me, I went to Wizards yesterday to try to pick up Carcasonne while it was on sale, but it wasn't on sale anymore (they were out), so instead I picked up a box of random D+D minis (prognosis: the game looks better than Mage Knight, the minis are certainly more suitable for normal D+D play than MK minis becuase they fit in the standard grid, and they aren't any more ugly on average) and the Draconomicon, which among much other dragon-related information, contained the tidbit that where normal human tongues would use underlines or boldface or italic for emphasis, draconic uses *asterisks*.

Skip Williams helped write the book, so I can't be that surprised.

Anyway, there was hardly anyone on the roads today, which was good, because it's not the kind of weather you want to try to drive through heavy traffic in. When I got to work, I discovered that the reason hardly anyone was on the roads was that the Washington State Department of Transportation declared an official snow day.

I didn't know they could do that.

But I'm here, so I'll probably try to get some work done.

They told me not to drive, but I made it home alive...

I actually had a pretty productive day at work, but I left early because I didn't want to try driving on the snow in the dark/I was lazy and there was no one else there to see what time I left.

I mean, no one -- out of 25 developers, I think I saw 3 in.

Anyway, I tried to stop at Crossroads on the way home from work -- it's not literally on the way, but it's only a block or so out of the way, barring traffic, and there was no traffic -- but it was closed. Foo. I guess I'll have to wait for the weekend to buy more minis.

Apparently, Bellevue has no snow plows. The snow on the drive home was hard packed into an icelike substance. The lines on the roads were completely obscured, which was frustrating since without heavy traffic, the streetlights were all in the mode where you need to be in the right place to ever get a light. There were the customary 'busses stranded askew at the sides of roads', but these looked deliberately grounded rather than driven into ditches. There were no ditches to drive them into, at any rate.

There were a couple scary moments -- one where I was braking as hard as I could without skidding just to *not speed up* going down a hill, and someone looked like they might try to turn in front of me without really having enough time to make it unless I slowed down. But they didn't. The second was when at the end of that hill, I stopped at the red light, and saw the grounded busses blocking a lane and a half of the uphill on the far side, which really looked like I might not make it up it -- but somehow I built up enough speed going across the intersection, and had enough traction on the hill, to make it to the top.

Actually, it's a good time to practice snow driving, since the traffic's so light.