MNF

Howdy pard'ners!

Hi, my name is Mike and I am a procrastinator...

Well since I last blogged, a lot has gone down. Lets start at the beginning. C won out and we put up out Christmas stuff on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I dragged the tree out from under the house, put it together and promptly ran away to the garage to work on the outdoor lights. We bought a pre-lit tree a year or so back which cut the stress down 50% but it is still too much for me! I came in to put the angel on top as C couldn't reach it. Outside I got the lights that outline the lower roof line but quit with that for now. I promptly blew a fuse on the first string when I mistakenly had three strings in a series... I used the watts-volts-amps equation, but fed it bad information. I was a bit low on the wattage of the C9 bulbs from memory and paid the price. I'll finish the display this weekend, decorating the shrubbery.

Monday we had a Monday Night Football game (duh) against the hated Green Bay Packers. I remember at the last home game I was talking to Kevin, the fella that sits next to us and he expressed how he'd love to see a snow game in Seattle. Fat chance I thought, I can't remember the last white Christmas that we had, good luck getting it on a Seahawk game. It snowed hard on Sunday. Dang, I thought. We get a rare MNF game in Seattle and it happens to be on the week that it dumps on Sunday. Rotten luck, snow typically doesn't stick around long around here, especially before December.

On Monday, sure enough, the snow has chilled out and Seattle looks like any other Monday in November. We head down to the game, head in to the J&M, the place where I got food poisoning, (I am a trooper) and tossed back some beverages. it was pretty chilly, but no snow, the sky was clear. Boo.

We head out for the game and pick up a street dog at the very place where Ken Hamlin had his skull broken with a road sign. I had cream cheese and onions on mine. Delicious!

We got to our seats with around twenty minutes until kickoff. The field was completely bare, just like any other Sunday. I noticed a single pathetic excuse for a snowflake and joked, "it's snowing!". We got a good chuckle out of that. Before the row started packing in we decided to put on our rain pants as it was cold, and they would keep us warmer. The teams head back into the locker rooms when boom, it started dumping...

Here are my rankings of football weather starting from least desirable to most desirable...
hot and sunny
cloudy grey day
cool but sunny (jacket needed)
rain
snow

And man did it!

The field was almost completely white by the time the game started except for the big rectangle where they had the big flag for the national anthem. Sweet! It kept snowing the whole first quarter and then let up. A good thing to, as GB looked like they new how to handle things in the white stuff and we didn't. I was pissed. The game was recording on the DVR at home (in beautiful HD), it was snowing and the Hawks looked horrible. I was going to have to go home and erase it. Thank goodness they shook off the icicles and stopped giving the game to GB in the second half. It turned out to be a pleasing win.

We happily skipped back to the car, made the endless trek out of the parking garage, shot up cherry street and hit the express lanes with a smile. The roads were fine, I was flying. I noticed on our new cars navigation screen that there were a few accidents on the freeway around our house and noticed that the regular lanes of I-5 was starting to backup badly even though we were miles from there. I darted off the freeway wondering what the big deal was. I quickly found out.

Off the freeway the roads were horrible. Solid ice an inch thick. We were hung up in traffic almost immediately. We had been driving 10 minutes and were over a third of the way home. The rest of the trip took an hour and a half in an endless ribbon of cars creeping at a walking pace. Aaargh!!! We passed countless parked vehicles. The Metro buses were all parked in the bus stops with lights flashing, one with a smashed mirror. One road had at least 6 lined up, unable to move. As we got closer to home I was able to pull off the main drag onto a road with barely anybody driving on it. What a relief. We still had to get up the hill to our house but with the new RDX's computer controlled all-wheel drive it was a breeze. Many cars didn't make it, and just pulled off to the side, sometimes nicely, many at a 45 degree angle, some backwards and a few in the ditch. I passed one guy in the middle of the road just spinning his tires going nowhere. He had a few people pushing so I kept my momentum and continued on home. Boy was it a relief when we got there.

We flipped on the news and saw that we were the lucky ones. My mothers 7 mile commute home from work took her 3 hours. Many took longer, and many just parked it at a restaurant, hotel or anywhere warm that they could camp out.


It is now time for bed... I still need to fill y'all in on our trip to Denver. Check back soon, don't give up on me!