Everybody I know is starting to come a little unhinged thanks to the snow.  One of my coworkers is stuck out on Bainbridge Island with no electricity, our friend Muneeb was one of the 3,000 people stuck at the airport thanks to delayed flights, and everybody I know who lives on the hill… well, let’s just say that if one of us gets all The Shining on somebody’s ass, I won’t be all that suprised.

So what do you DO when you can’t leave a 2 mile square radius of your house?  You start cooking.

The week I’ve been working from home is a little dull to say the least, but it has given me a chance to remember how freaking much I love oatmeal.  Oatmeal is awesome.  I think I could eat it just about every day.  And considering the last time I went on a big oatmeal binge was when I was trying to eat 100 grams of protein a day, I am much more in love with it right now because I don’t have to pour scoops of protein powder into it (nasty) anymore.  (By the way, what did I learn from that experiment?  Processed soy is bad for you.  Take note.)

So for the past week, since I’ve had time to make breakfast, this has been my standard go-to meal:

Scrambled egg whites with a little bit of aged gouda (yum) and slow-cook oatmeal with vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, dried cherries, golden raisins and pecans.

On a related food note, Mike had said that he had a crazy craving for a burger tonight.  This probably has something to do with the fact that I make way too much chicken (since I don’t eat beef).  He was even open to the idea of trying to walk down the hill to Dick’s, which is Seattle’s not as delicious but locally iconic version of In N Out.  Unfortunately, the icy sidewalks + the steep hill were not making that happen.

So, after doing a couple laps around the neighborhood with Barrie (it’s the most activity we can get right now), I decided to be a nice wife and make him a burger.  I had some ground sirloin in the freezer already, so I figured I could whip together some sort of homemade burger type meal for him, even if I couldn’t taste it and really don’t know how to tell when a burger is done.

Once I was in Safeway, I realized that I was about to totally score!  Thanks to the crappy weather, perishables were totally on sale.  I got a bunch of chicken, bacon and sausage on a two for one promotion.  There were similar deals on beef, but I don’t know crap about that and decided to come back with Mike tomorrow.  I ended up only paying $45 for $70 worth of groceries!  Yay!  (I know, I’m old.  I’m excited about groceries.  Even sadder, I’ve already posted this on my local knitting board to share the joy.)

Oh, and the burger turned out “awesome,” according to Mike.  This is particularly vindicating because, as anybody who has ever seen him eat anything I’ve made, he is not particularly gentle on his reviews.  This culinary success goes towards proving Derek’s theory that I am indeed really good at making food that I can’t taste.

We bundled up again and walked down to the Queen Anne and Highland, where almost a hundred people had gathered and decided that since the city doesn’t plow, we might as well all take advantage of it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcZr8rzGFLI

This chick had some serious speed going:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-_-qu0o7A

A group effort:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP3xAMtOF9E

Most creative vessel of the night:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUbzxTBmho0

I guess that’s what you get when you combine freak snowstorms, a poor infrastructure and lots of super fun hills.  It is definitely a bright spot in our virtual house arrest of late.

We look so cute bundled up.  Meanwhile, my toes were completely numb.

Mike won’t go wine-tasting with me, but he will do some snow tasting.  Disgusting.

On Thursday I tried to sled.  This plan didn’t work so well, considering my sledding materials of choice were the following:

Yeah, that’s me, rocking Marc Jacobs galoshes but still to cheap to buy a real sled and opting for the lid of my CSA bin and the top of our trash can instead.  I have awesome priorities.

And finally, for Mike’s friend Justin and my fabulous parents who will be visiting us soon:

Bring a jacket.

• “It doesn’t snow in Seattle.”
• “Eh, it may snow for like, 3 minutes, but by morning everything will melt.”
• “It NEVER snows here in [insert current month here].”

Obviously, people are in denial.  Or they are just liars.    Just look outside our office window:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWM1zfzBDOQ

I was awoken at 5:00 am by thunder and lightning.  Huh?  Is that even possible in conjunction with snow?  My boss emailed everybody on my team telling them to work from home today due to this outbreak of “thundersnow.”

This weather phenomenon is just confirming my belief that Mike and I do, indeed, have some sort of magnetic attraction for all things strange and random.  Seattle, I apologize for the deep freeze, but I think we brought it.

But snow?  I had no idea it snowed.  We had been here a week before somebody made an offhand comment about how little it snows here, to which I responded, eyes agog, “Wait a minute- it snows in Seattle?”  This person probably thought I was an idiot.

So once I started making friends and I mentioned my snow-phobia, everybody assured me that snow in Seattle is a total anomoly, practically a myth.  They said there were about two weeks a year that the roads would ice up a bit, people would get in a ton of car accidents, and then it would be over.  Seeing acutal white stuff on the ground, they told me, NEVER happens.

Then I looked out the window last night:

I was wary.  Especially considering that I had signed up for the Jingle Bell Run on Sunday.  Running in the SNOW?  People don’t do that.  I got nervous.  But then I remembered how everybody says that snow always melts during the night, so I’d be fine.

Then I looked out the window this morning:

Hmmm…  not exactly melted.  I didn’t want to be a total flake though, so I bundled up in as many layers as I could manage (including 2 of mike’s mismatched knee-high snowboarding socks.  I couldn’t find a matching pair for the life of me) and headed over to my friend Barrie’s house, where her very awesome and very brave boyfriend was there to drive us downtown.

I always hear people complain about Seattlites not knowing how to deal with snow.  Well, Barrie and Dominic are evidently the McGyvers of snow- here they are scraping Dominic’s car windows.  We didn’t have an ice scraper, so they used sticks:

We made it to the madhouse that was the race.  As should be expected, there was a bizarre error on my number identifying me as “Angie Bach,” a 22 year old who lives in Federal Way.  I was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of people to try and argue.

How many people were there?  Well, here is a picture I snapped as our heat started:

So yeah, there were a lot of people.

The race was good.  Considering that I’d been having visions of falling into a snow drift and having my corpse shoveled out days later, I was pretty happy that I ran it in 32 minutes (the thing was definitely too crowded to do much passing.)  Theoretically, I would like to subtract some time for when I slipped in an ice patch, scraped my knee and tore open my running pants right at the knee- now they have a cute “grunge” look to them.  Very Seattle.

I still finished the race, where I met Barrie, who had already finished and managed to ravage any freebies within a 3-mile radius.  I think she ended up walking away with 2 lbs of bananas:

We look cute, huh?

After the race we grabbed breakfast, where I saw the reason why print journalism is failing- this headline:

It’s going to be a fun winter.