My kitchen sink drains again! Hooray! It’s always the small things you fail to appreciate until a cruel twist of fate or the humor of some small god takes them away from you. Or, in this case, when some damn winter storm comes along and freezes your drain pipe solid.

Because it finally did snow. And then went below freezing. Then came the ice storm along with the lovely winds. And, really, it’s the ice that’s been stopping me from going to work these past couple of days. There was a half ice of it on top of the snow today which would sometimes give way under foot and sometimes not but always accompanied by skidding feet. So I had serious doubts about walking the block to the bus stop without twisting something. And then I would have had to take An hour and a quarter bus ride to go five miles. No thanks. Besides, none of my project leads were coming in, so why even bother?

But, to echo some of the thoughts in the comments of the post previous to this one, as storms go, this has been fairly minor, though you wouldn’t know it from the local news coverage. I mean, when I lived in Western Massachusetts, I was still expected to go to work even if a foot of snow had fallen during the night. And school hardly shut down at all in Pittsburgh due to snow and there are all the various genuine blizzards I’ve survived, you know, three feet in two days type of deals.

What is remarkable for me is the lack of ability the city of Portland has in dealing with this, the official services and average citizen alike. not to mention the crazy habit of putting drain pipes on the outside of the house (I really balked at that when we first looked at our house).

But no power outages and the only deaths so far have been traffic related. And if the temperatures do get up to 41 degrees Fahrenheit as they claim, then all this will melt away like a dream in a matter of hours. And wait another five years for the next serious winter storm.