Freezing Man

Portland was inundated with massive amounts of snow today.  The normally busy city was far emptier than usual, leaving us with an enormous landscape of urban infrastructure to play in.  After going downtown and finding that nearly all the major stores were closed, we decided to engage in our own entertainment by creating random quick art out of the snow. 



Staircases make a nice blank canvas:



Lights at the foot of the walkway let us make snow jack-o-lanterns:





Traffic cones make for premade snowcones:





The shelter structure in the center of Pioneer Square collapsed under the weight of the snow, leaving a tangled mess of insufficiently strong metal and canvas.  I'm thinking to myself... so I'm in this harsh environment with white dust on the ground and in the air, working hard to practice self-reliance, making art everywhere, looking at collapsed temporary camp structures, talking with people who are so bundled up you can barely recognize them... this all seems so familiar!

Oh, I think I've got it:

vs

Yeah, that's it.

Misc Christmas goodies

A New York TImes fashion reporter randomly stumbles on the New York Santarchy and loves it:

Warm greetings from Portland, where the wind chill today was 6 degrees F!



And the truck driver who will surely be getting a lump of coal in his stocking for making I-5 so miserable for the rest of us:

Unintentional snow trip

I had big plans for my Pacific Northwest roadtrip.  It's amusing how few of them came to fruition.  I ended up seeing less than half the people I hoped to see, and I instead got a lesson in extreme driving conditions.  In any case, I made the most of it.  I got to know the hippier-than-thou* town of Olympia thanks to the kind hosting of a friend-of-a-friend, and got to play in the snow in Portland with simbubba  and zingkotori  .

Today I drove my puny little rented front-wheel-drive Chevy Aveo (lowest user satisfaction of any 2008 compact) from Portland to Seattle in a snowstorm... at 30mph.  At that speed the drive is about six hours.  About 40 miles in, my tire chains broke.  I was unable to purchase new ones, and had less than 24 hours to get to Seattle's airport to fly out, so I decided to cruise on the snow-on-ice highway concoction sans chains.  I found it useful to understand the boundary conditions of my car's control by simulating sudden brakings, little skids, and fishtails from the center lane when no other cars were around so that I could practice recovering from them for more critical times.  

Lots of cars passed me, some driving cars similar to mine at 60mph.  There were a good number of accidents, though not as many as I expected.  All in all, I saw about 6, mostly near the Seattle/Olympia area.  Given that such accidents take a good amount of time to clear and there was a decent amount of traffic, that means that the actual chance of any given driver getting in an accident on that drive was very roughly 1 in 400, which seems surprisingly low given how some people were driving. 
 

*(not hipper-than-thou... hippier.  The place made me feel like I was personally responsible for every species that has gone extinct in the last 50 years)