1 Got a couple inches up here, then another dusting.  The streets have mostly melted off, but not the sidewalks in my neighborhood.

2

That snow is now completely gone. You can't even tell it happened.

Which is pretty typical for snow around here. Snow that sticks, and is deep enough so that you can do snowballs, is maybe one year in three. Snow deep enough to justify shoveling -- maybe one year in ten. It hasn't happened in the six years since I moved back here.

It's ocean effect. Our weather here is more moderate year round than the same latitude 1000 miles to the east: cooler in summer, and warmer (and wetter) in winter. (We're at the same latitude as Ottawa.)

Portland specifically does get some amazing ice storms. Cold wind blows west down the Columbia River Gorge, and rainstorms blow east off the Pacific, and sometimes they meet here. Warm wet air aloft, and cold air on the ground, means ice up to an inch thick on everything.

I remember one ice storm, late 1970's. I stood next to a wooded area, and every minute or two there was a loud crash as some branch on some tree gave up and fell off. It was pretty amazing.

And it's scary to watch people trying to drive on it, especially on the hills.

3 Either you're forgetting December of 2008 when you say there hasn't been snow worth shoveling in the last 6 years, or your opinion of not worth shoveling is pretty extreme.  I had three feet of snow in my yard just South of you in Tigard, and even with chains on the car, driving around Beaverton was pretty scary.

This morning there was a very light dusting in the yard at 8am, and it was mostly gone a couple of hours later, but then just after noon a short but intense flurry dropped enough snow to pile about 3/4 of an inch on my car in maybe 15 minutes.  But then the sun came out, and it mostly melted.  But there is still some left on the trees and bushes, and pretty much anywhere that didn't get hit by the sun before it went down.

4

I think that living in Massachusetts for ten-odd years may have changed my standards. I haven't seen anything here like what we got every winter there.

The last winter I was there we set an all-time record for snowfall by February, and it kept snowing through April. I moved away in November of that year, and the first major snowstorm happened the day after I flew out. (The moving truck carrying my stuff got caught in it.)

5 And the snow we get here is a joke compared to what Duckburg gets.

6 Duckford.  We actually just got our first snowfall of the winter this past Thursday.  Just over five inches; Duck U. closed early to let the staff go home before the worst of it hit, and to prevent the night class students from having to come in.  Considering that the city usually gets 10" of snow in December and we got nothing this year, I'll live with it.  Heck, the day before the snow hit, it was 56°.

Actually, in the grand scheme of things, Duckford doesn't get all that much snow; around 40 inches per winter.  The first winter I lived in MN, we got that much in one week, though that was with a 28" snowfall on Halloween.

7 It's sixty degrees here, guys.

At 4 AM.

It hasn't even frozen yet this winter.

8 Avatar, we're getting it here.  It's a cold and rainy winter down here, and further south they've been getting snow up in the hills.

Only thing is, it's supposed to be summer.

9 I live about two hours' drive from the Duck.  I got eight inches of global warming during that same storm.

...I was riding my motorcycle two days earlier.  That's probably over now until March or April.

10 Dang, Avatar, you've lucked out.  There have been several freezes north of you.  That said, I think the low last night was supposed to have been in the 50s.  I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, though--it wouldn't be the first year when winter started in February and more than made up for its tardiness.

Sometimes, I do lust after the climate of the Willamette.  No hard freezes (south of the Gorge)?  No "northers" bringing in air straight from the Yukon?  Summers that rarely--if ever--hit triple digits?  Real mountains, that you don't have to drive 12 hours to see on the horizon, and a reliable 40" of rain to keep everything nice and green?  Sign me up, please.

11 I'm actually taking a sick day from work.  I'm in a VERY narrow convergence zone. at the moment.  This morning I had to drive down to Kirkland, and the highways were variable from clear to messy (And it turned out my mortgage broker couldn't get there, so a wasted trip) but up here in Lake Stevens, I've got at least 6-8" of Global Warming on my deck rails.  It's not snowing south of Everett or North of Marysville based on the radar map, but this narrow band has just been sliding through lengthwise right over me.

I COULD make it to work in my little Subaru, but I'm very concerned about my ability to make it HOME safely tonight.

12

BigD, I think I've said this before, but what the hell:

I grew up in Portland, and when we studied history in grade school, we studied the Oregon Trail -- for obvious reasons, I think. And when I was grown up and started working, a couple of times I went out to eastern Oregon to a couple of places where the Oregon Trail ran.

I always wondered why people would go through such a trial. To leave everything they knew, pack a few belongings into a wagon, and travel thousands of miles to a place they'd never seen, in hopes that it might be better than what they left? They must have all been insane. -- or so I thought.

It wasn't until I moved to Massachusetts that I began to understand. The soil there is terrible. It's not very fertile, and it's full of rocks. They used to make fences around their fields out of stones -- not because other materials were scarce, but simply because they needed to put all the stones somewhere that they picked up out of the soil so that they could plow what was left.

The reports going back east from here were unanimous: the soil was wonderful, the weather was favorable, the Indians were not dangerous (and there weren't many in any case), and of course this being the era of homesteading, the land was free. Plus there was lots of game, and the streams and rivers were teeming with fish. After the trials of the trip, it must have seemed like they had reached heaven.

And they, in turn, would have joined  the chorus sending messages back east -- hey, it was worth the trip!