The Great Seattle Snow 2021
"Records" are funny, especially when referring to weather events—it's so easy to come up with a "record" this or that, depending on the metric you choose to use. For instance, apparently yesterday was Seattle's snowiest single day in 52 years, with 8.9 inches falling within the calendar date of February 13, 2021.
Now, yesterday has been the most notable day in a sequence of four straight days with snow accumulation. It's just, none of the other days got nearly as much snowfall, and the total over these four days has been roughly a foot of snow. An incredible amount of snow by any typical Seattle standards, to be sure, but remember the massive snow events we had in February all of two years ago? Between February 8 and February 11, 2019—another four-day-span—we got a cumulative total of 17.5". (See my own Seattle snowfall history and scroll down to 2019 to find my sourcing to get to that number. Combine that with a previous snow event February 3-4 that same month, and we totalled 20.2" of snow in February 2019 alone.)
That sequence of snowfalls, even limiting to the four-day stretch yielding 17.5", surpassed even the longer-lasting sequence of snowfalls over two weeks through Christmas 2008, a cumulative number of single snowfalls yielding far less per day but adding up to a total of 13.9" in December 2008. That one lasted so long I was seriously happy to see it finally wash away, and at the time it was a stunner. The February event two years ago, though, packed the biggest snow-wallop of any snow events I have lived though in two decades living in Seattle. And taking the perods of snow starting and snow stopping, this past weekend comes in third, of you measure overall severity by cumulative snowfall.
Yesterday still made quite an impact, of course. And that was on the third day of this—although the bulk of the snow accumulation had indeed arrived by morning, so, right after the second overnight snowfall. Very light flurries had begun just after my FaceTime lunch with Karen on Thursday, and by evening it was pretty solid snowfall happening—although, the flakes were so tiny, I did not think it was accumulating very much.
Friday was basically a transitional period. I had gone to swap out paperwork at the office Thursday evening, knowing it was best to get it done then before any real snow started happening, but I did get a few nice photos of a lightly dusted fifth-floor patio, with some nice views of the city. Within this four-day stretch, I only got two shots on Friday, one of them being the brief video clip at the top of this post, looking straight across the street from my bedroom windows.
By the time I actually ventured outside yesterday morning at just after 11 a.m., there was already far more snow than it appeared from our condo windows four floors up. I really had kept looking outside thinking, wow, it's been snowing so long and there's not much on the ground. Shows what I know! I went outside to take the recycling out, and was stunned by the depth of the snow I had to walk through along the second-floor courtyard you get to walk through to get to the garbage room. I had to go back to the condo on the fourth floor to fetch my measuring tape, and then I went up to the rooftop deck. The first place I measured wasn't even the deepest place, but the snow just on the ledge around the deck measured rouhly eight inches!
I chose to embed that one instead of my other tape-measure photo just because it's a better photo, with the fogged-out Seattle skyline in the background. But, I then measured the snow on the floor of the rooftop deck up there, and was relatively shocked: ten inches! I realized then that it was definitely a good thing I had my ingenius idea of wrapping my feet in plastic sacks before slipping them into my snow boots. My feet did not get the slightest bit wet, even after walking a good three miles round-trip yesterday, all through the snow.
And this is where Shobhit gets his Social Review point for the weekend! I actually thought he'd get yet another one for today, but we wound up never leaving the house all day today. We were going to go out for breakfast, but that got nixed when we decided to have fried eggs with some of the bread Shobhit bought while walking around yesterday. We came home yesterday with a lot of bread, pastries and cookies. Way too much, really. But whatever.
Shobhit was actually supposed to work yesterday, in fact. But, with the snow issue, Shobhit made the decision to take the bus. He walked downtown, deliberately timing it so he'd get to the stop at Sixth and Olive roughly an hour before he would otherwise need to catch the #41. And, guess what? In all that time, a #41 just . . . never came at all. He called in to Big 5 a couple of times while he waited, finally deciding to say he wasn't going to make it, and taking sick time for the day. He already had today scheduled off, so he got a nice two-day block of days off, which he does not often get.
And, I had been thinking about taking a walk on my own before finding out about all of this, and at first I was going to walk in the opposite direction. I have taken so many Seattle snow pictures over the years now, and they are always of the same location. I really wanted to go back to that little park on 29th and Columbia, called Nora's Woods, that Alexia and I discovered last June on one of our many walks. I thought I'd get some nice snowy photos in the thick foliage there.
But, when I found out Shobhit was calling it quits on the work day and would be going over to Pike Place Market, I decded to go west instead of east, and meet him there. I still took plenty of photos, of course—and so did Shobhit, in fact; of the many he texted to me, I kept about 12 shots. Those combined with the whole lot I still took on my own (15 on the round-trip walk yesterday alone), my full photo album on Flickr for this snowy four-day stretch added up to a total of 51 shots.
Anyway, I was a little achy by the time we got back from our walk yesterday, and I was more than ready to be back home even before we left downtown coming back. Shobhit suggested we actually catch Light Rail back up Capitol Hill, but when we went down into Westlake Station, the sign said the next northbound train wasn't for another forty minutes! What the fuck? I had never seen a delay like that, aside from when there was something like a car crash obstructing the tracks somewhere—not even during the lessened frequency of trains during the pandemic. I thought snow was not supposed to be a major problem for Light Rail? Am I remembering wrong? I mean, from their own website, they say Link and Sounder operate regular service during cold and icy weather, but some emergencies, such as mudslides, can cancel service. There were no mudslides yesterday, so what gives? I can't find anything about it online now. Oh, well.
In any case, although I managed never to slip and fall one day, I did slip and almost fall, while walking downtown to meet Shobhit. I was walking in the middle of Pine Street just so I had the space to get around slowpokes ahead of me (and by the way, a lot of people were out and about yesterday, evidently enjoying the novelty of the snow themselves), and when I turned to move back onto the sidewalk via an alleyway entrance, I slipped while pivoting, and I really thought that alone might make my legs ache. To my surprise, I haven't had any real aches today or even last night; it was just a relief to get back home again.
Before that, though, first I met up with Shobhit in line at Piroshky Piroshky at Pike Place Market. He already had ben to La Panier and spent over $50 there on bread, pastries and cookies. And then we got more pastries at the Piroshky place! They have wonderful savory ones, though, and we split two of them at the abandoned tables in the main portio of the Market across the street. No one else had until we did it, and then two other couples followed our lead. We walked the length of the Market inside it back up to Pike Street, and closer to the north end there were signs on those tables asking people not to eat on them due to COVID-19 safety. Oops? There were no such signs where we had gone, and also, we never set out food actually on the table anyway: we only set the sack on it and pulled the pastries out of the sack.
Shobhit and I have otherwise spent a lof of time this weekend watching episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, now about halfway through th second season. We're really enjoying it. I still need to watch and review Judas and the Black Messiah, which was released on Netflix on Friday, and I was going to watch it then, but Shobhit wanted me to start on chopping vegetables for dinner before he got home from work, and after that I spent the rest of the evening in the living room with him . . . much of it watching The Larry Sanders Show.
So then I thought I would watch it yesterday instead, except then I went on this long walk in the snow, and with a couple of other FaceTime hangouts that I'll wait to write about until tomorrow's post, I have just spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with Shobhit. It's been pretty nice, actually. He's not really interested in the aforementioned movie, and since he works a later shift until 8:30 tomorrow evening, I decided I'll just watch the movie then.
I keep forgetting that tomorrow is Presidents Day, a federal holiday. (We won't even get into President Fuckwit getting acquitted yesterday in his second impeachment trial.) In Gabriel's school district, this whole snow thing has been perfectly timed: they have a four-day weekend, as they already had Friday also scheduled as a day off. Apparently they keep these days open for use as "make-up days" if they have any snow closures, and they take the day off on an otherwise scheduled date later in the winter if it's never needed otherwise. They had not needed any, and they were going to use one of them Friday, as scheduled since long before anyone knew snow would be coming. So, it turned out being a legit snow day anyway. Honestly no one would need tomorrow as a snow day; it's 9:11 p.m. as a writee this and the snow has finally turned to rain, but it will still take a day or two for the snow to be all washed away.
It was a fun diversion for a few days, but I am also grateful that even when we break records, snow never stays around for long. I remain fond of the rain that is much more emblematic of this city I so love.
[posted 9:15 pm]