Snow in Seattle is usually something of a joke. We get an inch and the entire city shuts down. This weekend the snow got serious.

Nizzibet and I picked up a new (used) car from her brother in LA on Saturday and started driving north on I5. We stopped for the night about 40 miles north of Sacramento and started driving again on Sunday morning at 5:30 am. At about 1 o’clock, about 250 miles south of Seattle we put chains on the car. Everyone else was doing it. And, even though the road was clear, all the bushes and trees all along the road were covered in ice. We hit snow on the road about 10 miles later. And it was snow all the way north. The snow was falling heavily in Portland so we spent an hour trying to find a friend’s house in order to impose on them. Luckily for them I couldn’t remember how to reach their place and all my phone numbers were at home on the computer. We gave up looking at about the time the snow let up so we headed north again.

Going 180 miles driving no faster than 40 mph makes an already long trip seem even longer. We stopped at a rest stop about 70 miles north of Portland and discovered that somewhere along the way we’d lost the chains off our right front tire. By that time I was going to stop if I could help it and for all we knew the chains had fallen off 5 minutes after we put them on. So we kept going. We finally arrived at home at a little after 1. And then I got to spend the next half hour shoveling snow so I get the car into our parking space.

And the illustration today? It’s showing the difference between the design department (with properly supported computers) and the rest of cubicle farm in a corporation.