5 Reasons For A Seattle Snowpocalypse

Happy Friday!

Recently, my friend Sarah shared 10 Reasons I Would Die In A Zombie Apocalypse.  Which made me laugh because I can totally relate.  And it also got me thinking about our recent Seattle Snowpocalypse.  Over two weeks, we got about 24 inches of snow, which is a lot for the Pacific Northwest.  First, everybody. freaked. out.  Then we completely shut down, and life as we know it ceased to exist.  I'm sure the rest of the world was laughing at us, so I thought I'd try to explain a Seattle snow event from the inside out.

First, some background.  Even though we live in the far north, Seattle is actually fairly temperate.  Because of the warming influence of the Pacific Ocean, it takes a pretty rare combination of weather events to produce snow.  And two weeks of heavy snow?  Only happens every 10-12 years.

Our weather people have no idea how to predict snow, so they just throw out a forecast and hope they're right.  Which they never are.  And if they even mention the word "flake", panic ensues.  Schools close down preemptively.  Everyone leaves work at the same time, causing gridlock.  There's a run on kale and tomatoes at the grocery store (I'm not kidding.  All the produce was gone, but there was water and bread a-plenty.  Seattleites are so weird).

In our defense, there are reasons.  Kind of. 

1/ Seattle has very little snow equipment.  Only a handful of plows, since they get used so rarely.  And forget salt, because fish and the environment.  I mean, Seattle is pretty much wrapped in a "green" blanket.  So whatever falls on the roads is staying on the roads, until the temps warm up.

2/ Nobody knows how to drive in the snow.  There are two kinds of Seattle snow drivers:  the over confident 4 wheel drive trucker, and the under confident, go five miles per hour driver.  Neither should be on the road, but there they are.  And even if a person learns winter driving skills, they're forgotten between years of no snowfall.  To be fair, Seattle drivers also can't drive in the rain.  Or in sunshine.  We just crash into each other a lot, in general.

After the first storm.  But wait, there was more!

3/ The hills.  Oh, the hills.  Everything in Seattle is on a hill.  My house is in the middle of a huge hill, so up or down it is.  The city's answer?  Put a sign at the bottom that says "road closed".  That's super helpful.

4/ The snow is wet and heavy, and compacts down to an icy hell.  The only way to stay ahead of it is with continuous shoveling.  And as mentioned above, most people don't even own a snow shovel.  We did have one, until I gave it to my son at college and forgot to buy another.  A fact which my husband may have mentioned a few times over the two weeks he removed snow with a garden shovel.  Oops.

5/  The bottom line?  We're snow wimps.  Give us days on end of a rainy 50 degrees, and we're happy.  Actually, not even then.  Come to think of it, Seattleites also complain in the summer that it's too hot.  So apparently we're just weather wimps.  During our two week snowpocalypse, there was no mail.  Garbage wasn't picked up.  Not a single day of school.  And you couldn't even buy kale or tomatoes.  The horror. 

It's all over now, mostly.  There's still a lot of snow piled up, but the roads are clear, and we're back to regular weather complaining.  Until the next flake flies.

Have a great weekend!  I'm off on a mother/son adventure with my oldest, so follow along on IG to see what we're up to.  There better not be snow where we're going!