[dramatic musical notes to create emotional tension until topic is revealed: dun dun dunnnn]
...the weather
Geez. Crawled outta bed at oh-four-hundred this morning and stepped out the front door to head to AM grunt job... Encountered SNOW. Everywhere. The neighborhood looked like some wintertime Thomas Kincade painting. Except, hello?, it's bleeping March. It's not even early March. We've already passed most of March's milestones: the Ides**, St. Patrick's Day, barry's NCAA bracket gettin' blowed up by some minor-conference overachiever, and even the stinkin' equinox! It's pretty much LATE March now.
There was about 3/4" when I left the house. As I write this this afternoon, it has literally been snowing non-stop since before 4:00am. The accumulation topped out at about 2" before it warmed slightly, so the new snow is falling at about the replacement rate of the melting snow. Which means the whole town is now a big sloppy Slurpee. I'm sure the mountains that surround our valley are getting hammered. Depending on which weather forecaster is flappin' lip at any given moment, we're supposed to get from 2 to 5 more inches this evening and another 1 to 3 tomorrow.
Alright, this is just stupid. We rarely get meaningful amounts of snow even in the depths of winter. Never in March. So far this year we haven't hit 70o at all. Only three days in the freekin' 60s! Enough! Tell ya what's gonna happen: I'm gonna stroll right into the #occupy camp and find the tent where that lazy punk Global Warming hangs out. I'm gonna haul him out of his tent, punch him in the spleen, and say "Listen to me, Global Warming, you disgusting emo skinny-jean layabout lump of fail! Get out there and get to work, or I'll get Glee! cancelled!"
Notice, that I'm only gonna spleen-punch him once. To do so twice might make him too exuberant. That would be bad. Like, f-word bad. Because around here, unseasonable snow is usually followed by warm rain, which leads to the f-word. Flood. I ain't ready to play that game again.
---------------------------------------
Wanna know what else ticks me off? (Actually I'm sure you don't, but I'm going all-in on the venting today.)
Morons who think they're smarter than Mother Nature. The highway between here in Corvallis and the Oregon coast is a twisty and nasty. Scenic, too, but I digress. ODOT has spent the last dozen or so years widening the road and straightening the curves. But there worst part, around Eddyville, has remained unimproved. The land around there is very unstable. It gets around 100" of rain per year. There are frequent mudslides and the occasional boulder rolling onto the roadway. So what genius plan did the ODOT braintrust come up with? "Hey, let's build a whopping bridge, many miles long, over the whole mess! Let's make parts of it over 200' high! And let's also leave it up to the contractor to figure out how to stabilize the mud under the footings. Mud that never sits still and is certain to totally spazz out during an earthquake! It'll be the biggest contract we've ever awarded! Yay for smart people!"
So the contractors started working and then noticed all the concrete they'd poured was moving around. So they told ODOT they need more dough to do more stabilizing. ODOT gave 'em more cash. Literally millions of yards of dirt have been rearranged, but the whole thing is still jello. There are magnificent concrete columns rising 200' feet in the air, but they move about 3/4" annually. May not sound like much, but concrete doesn't have a lot of "give." It is either stable or it is a pile of rubble. So there is no bridge atop the columns. Contractor said they need a LOT more scratch if they're gonna make it work. ODOT said no. So contractor said, "later, dudes!" Now everybody's lawyered up and givin' each other the stink eye. And a trip to the coast involves driving past at a bunch of really expensive giant concrete columns sticking out of the middle of nothing. They look like huge middle fingers to me.
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man...
---------------------------------------
** that post from 3 years ago seemed to me like a pretty funny one. But my meager readership was even more meager back then. Dunno if a single person read it the first time.
Well, weather suckage aside (and I DO sympathize)... there's this:
ReplyDeleteThe highway between here in Corvallis and the Oregon coast is a twisty and nasty. Scenic, too, but I digress.
I've ridden that road, if it's the one I'm thinkin' about, and there's no finer road on the face o' the planet from a sport-biker's perspective. Lotsa smiles-per-mile on that one, along with whoops and hollers, too.
lotsa barfing and all-around-gross stuff to deal with on the way too. Especially if you have a dog...
DeleteYep. Every decent sized inland town (Grants Pass, Roseburg, Eugene, etc) has a highway connecting it to the coast. And without exception they are beautiful and a ton of fun when operating sporty equipment whether 2 wheels or 4.
DeleteGlobal Cooling - wow, you West Coast'ers are cutting edge. We have had four days of on again off again fog...eerie. Biden was in town, and I swear I heard him say, "...and I would've gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling kids!"
ReplyDeleteYou *did* hear Biden say that. He was talking to his Cabbage Patch collection again.
DeleteIt's brand new to me. Put windmills on top of those columns.
ReplyDeleteDa**it, Odie! Now I gotta delete your comment before some hemp smoking/eating/wearing hippie sees your words and tries to put them into action!
DeleteWe had big fat flakes coming down all day yesterday, but the killer stuff didn't start hitting until around 2 a.m. Around 4, my Bride let the dog out to deliver some pee-mail, promptly forgot about him, and went back to bed. The howling woke me up half an hour later, so I went down to investigate, and through the sliding glass door, noticed what appeared to be an animated snowball. Took two towels to dry him off, and it looked like 3-4" of wet, heavy stuff was out there.
ReplyDeleteThis morning, oohrah! trees and bushes bent to near ground level with heavy snow. Power outages and downed trees galore (I've always wondered why they tell you to "call before you dig" when they run all the power and phone and cable and dsl lines up in the air)...guy on the radio said there were 40 wrecks by 8 a.m. - entirely believable; people get really silly around here. How silly? I was powering uphill on a layer of snow/ice, steady, moderate speed, and there's a lady in the middle of the road, spinning wheels. She had chains on the rear wheels, and was in the process of discovering that it doesn't do a lot of good when you've got a front-wheel drive rig. Yeesh.
That whole highway 20 thing's just amazing - some of the bridges are up and looking nice, but can't be driven on. Talk about a monument to futility! What I don't get is the why: DOGAMI has had solid geological maps of the area for around 25 years that I know of, and they're really inexpensive. I was driving through with my Bride back when they were still working on the "project", and commented that I hoped they had some slide maps.
I'm thinking they should get together with the folks who've been peeing millions of dollars away on that new I-5 bridge; seems like a match made in Heaven!
As one of your loyal, yet meager readers all I can say is: AL GORE IS STILL WRONG!!! Global cooling is an inconvenient truth.
ReplyDeleteNow move along or I'll have an Occupod throw fecal matter at you. But don't worry. It's socialist-approved fecal matter.
Did Godzilla attack the would be bridge?
ReplyDeleteI remember back in the 70's we had snow in April ...until about noon. It was pretty spectacular while it lasted.
ReplyDeleteSince I wasn't a regular back in 2009 (haven't been regular for the last decade!), I read the "Ides" post for the first time. It was funny and as satirically sharp as a double edged Japanese sword. I especially like the little things like "St. Ides Malt Liquor," and ballet dancing Rahm getting into an "en pointe" position. Mighty good stuff, Inno.
ReplyDeleteHope the snow is gone now, I know it looks great on TV and in the movies, but not so much when you have to dig your way out of it.
ReplyDeleteAs for that bridge to nowhere, what a waste, I'm surprised they didn't do their home work prior to wasting all that money.