Waiting for slow busses in snow

Good evening! It’s freakin’ cold outside. We have had snow, off and on, the past week with a whole bunch starting last night. We usually bus it around town, but lately there hasn’t been a choice, even if we’d wanted to drive. Last night was a quick hop up the #14 to yummy dinner at ¿Por Qué No?. It is great food, but Kim and I agree that they need a few burritos on their menu.

Today, we had to run errands a bit further — places involving multiple bus transfers. Although the Trimet website says that busses are running 15-30 minutes behind schedule, you’d think that with a frequent service bus (they run every 15 minutes), they would all be uniformly delayed and you wouldn’t notice much. In reality, we were often waiting a half-hour to an hour in the snow for the frequent service busses. At one point, we saw 5 #14’s pass by in the other direction before our #14 arrived. Similarly, we saw two or three #70’s before the direction we needed arrived.

That Hot Totty at lunch was great.

The temperature and snow isn’t so bad by itself, but the bitter wind makes it nasty. The part of me that was getting upset at having to wait in the snow for the bus got its revenge by cheering at passing cars as they spun and slid out of control. You know that corner at Hawthorne & 12th where Hawthorne becomes one-way and the westbound traffic needs to do two turns (like a “Z”) to make it to the next street over? Lots of people did some fun fishtailing around the corners. This was especially true with people with chains on their tires. I guess the chains make some people over-confident in your driving (or, more specifically: stopping) ability. One lady in a little Subaru with chained tires did a 360. Weeee haw! That made me cheer.

In theory, we have a solstice party to go to tonight. In practice… well, it will be a walk of a little over a mile. We will probably still go, but that walk is going to suck. The current outside temperature is 18F/-7C, but the weather report says that with wind-chill it seems to be more like 6F/-14C. There is currently about 14cm of snow on the windowsill, but when I started writing this blog post it was more like 12cm. Brrrrr

Posted in: Dear Diary Portland

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