More Fun than a Barrel Full of Monkeys

That's Portland in a snowstorm. It snows but twice a year - once in Nov/Dec and once in Jan/Feb - and real snowstorms - the serious, sticking kind - are a once-every-three-years special. It's understandable then that when such an event does occur, especially if coinciding with the morning commute, that the whole thing is quite an ordeal. Portlanders, bless their rain-soaked hearts, cannot drive in the snow. To be fair, most cities with considerable snowfall have these things called "plows" that take care of the roads before anyone is even awake.We don't. The vast majority of the ones in Oregon have been allocated to the eastern side of the state and to the mountain passes, because that's normally the only place it ever snows significantly.

I had an eight a.m. class, and so I was out the door by seven. Shortly before I left the PSU website had no alerts saying it was closed. OregonLive had a few other school cancellations, and since PSU has a reputation of NEVER closing, I figured class was on. Fast forward an hour and forty-five minutes and I'm still on the bus, about a mile from campus. We'd been sitting at this same intersection for twenty minutes. I got out and walked. By the time I got to campus there were signs taped to the doors announcing the delayed opening of campus at ten. So I found a study nook and caught up on some reading. At twenty to, I left for my ten o'clock archaeology class. I no sooner stepped out onto the eerily quiet downtown street when my phone rang. The loud jangling from my pocket startled me, and had there been any passerby, or even a bird for that matter, they would have been startled too. It was mom.

"Where are you?" she asked.
I sighed. I knew what was coming. "Downtown. Why?"
"PSU is closed!" she announced cheerfully.
"Those bastards!" One step ahead of them all morning. This wasn't fair.

After seeing one stuck bus after another and cars spinning their tires and bicyclists (seriously guys, worst idea EVER!) skidding sideways, I realized that the fastest way home was a four-mile walk. Slipping and sliding I kept pace by muttering "the Cup and Saucer Cafe had soooo better be open," every so often. It was. As usual, there was a line, but once I got a table and my omelette, that food was gone practically before the waitress had made it back to the kitchen. I got home roughly ten minutes before I would have on an ordinary day with classes.

Highlights were the dumb bicyclists eating snow, and the "adventure bus" game, where passengers had to exit the bus while it drifted sideways into traffic. See? Barrel of monkeys...