I did the drive on I-5 from Seattle to San Fran on Sunday (well, started Saturday night) and had the pleasure of going over not only the pass in S. Oregon, but also through Shasta and I will tell you that you are incredibly smart and lucky that you did it earlier. By our wimpy west coast standards it was practically a blizzard. Home sweet home!

HAA! Snausage-ing. Here’s an odd porny thing that was said at my work today (a catering kitchen): (by me) when people kept coming by my workspace and SNIFFING: “will everyone PLEASE stop sniffing my area?” I, of course found it very funny right away, but no one else got it. I beat it into the ground, though. MY AREA!!! HAS BEEN SNIFFED!!!

We have a foot of snow. I’m so weirded out by it. We’re 50 feet above effing Puget Sound! Seriously though, I love it. It’s my son’s birthday today and I keep telling him that I ordered the snow just for him. We spent 3 hours out there and I heard him make noise exactly once. He plopped down in the middle of the front yard and duuuuug, and plowed and snow angel’ed the whole time. I’ll admit I was a tiny bit bummed that school was cancelled today. I was looking forward to my 2&1/2 hours to myself this morning.
OH! Engineers? My step dad is one….and thankfully accepts the endless teasing for knowing things like the difference between snow/sleet/hail.

Well, I’d kill for some of that snow. (Having never seen snow, I know that I may change my mind when actually confronted with the stuff – hey I’ve caught your parenthetical disease). It is 10.10am as I write this from the glory of my airconditioned living room, but outside it is still 10.10am and it is 38C already!!! (Which for all you non metric people means its just tipped 100F) the forcast is for 45C (113F) but I’m betting it will reach 48C (120F) so send me some snow!!!
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Snasuages is my second favorite dog-related food-stuff commercial, trumped only by “IIIIIIIIIIT’S BACON!” Which I guess the guy can yell while he’s snasauging.

Ha! “Suffering in (Fat) Silence”

We ran a one-mile marathon (I know, it’s supposed to be witty) Thanksgiving morning and all I could think about while running alongside the Columbia was how those extra 100 calories burned would definitely excuse eating and extra slice of Chocolate Cream Pie. Three seven slices later, I sweat silently on the couch with my pants unbuttoned for the rest of the evening. God, I hate Thanksgiving.

The one-ply thing? One ply is supposed to be much better for septic systems (i.e. what people use in the country, as opposed to sewers), hence the market is big enough to justify its existence. Why people would use it when they don’t have to? That I cannot explain.

Oy. Snausaging. I’ll have to mention it to the boys in my life, and that means it’ll probably be in active usage within a year. Also, one ply? Is evil. My roommates insist upon buying it, which means I have begun hoarding precious quilted gazillion-ply because there are some things in life you just CAN’T CHEAP OUT ON. And tush-maintenance is one of those things.

I remember snow days. Then we moved to Wyoming, where it is considered a waste of money to even bother plowing the streets. So we drive on ice and snow all winter. Stupid “oh we’re all hardcore and mountainy and rugged and street maintenance is for sissies” mindset. I would weep tears of joy if they would just SALT THE STUPID GROCERY STORE PARKING LOT, ALREADY.

There is no Dana!!! Only Zuuuul!

(I’ll never think of Snausages the same way you perv)

I’m jealous of your snow-sleet-whatever. It was about 65 here today, which isn’t so holly-jolly-holiday. I’m ready for snow!! Elmo = Zulu is awesome, love that.

So…the one-ply. My parents are staunchly one-ply (Scott!) as is my sister (who is…well off, to put it nicely, so it is not cost, I guess), and my parents do it because they have old toilets, including a European up-flushing number, and claim that two-ply clogs the pipes. My sister, however, has absolutely no excuse, and Scotts her way into oblivion and actually came to visit me and *chastised me* for the “amount of money I spend on toilet paper.” Which is money well-spent if you ask me, because I like a clean, aloe’d bum.

I’m with you 100% on the one ply. My parents buy it and I know for a fact aht they have a sewer system on Long Island. Two ply is worth every penny.

“A dog tried to eat me and the toaster’s been laughing at me!”

i was a slutty kid. i was known for drinking wine with the wild boys, wearing thick eyeliner and allowing many “partial snowy afternoons.” i got a really bad reputation quick. stay away from snow jobs.

My husband and I, when we were dating, would spend Wild Nights at the store with a calculator, comparing the per-square-inch cost of various toilet papers. (We were CRAAAAAAAAAZY in our youth, clearly. This activity demonstrated to me that he was probably the guy I should marry, since there are so few people who will put up with that kind of thing.) Anyway, we’re talking about data well over 10 years old, but we found that per square inch, taking into account the doubleness of two-ply, the cheaper two-plys (like Target brand) are cheaper than one-ply. Lots of times, people think one-ply is cheaper because they fail to take into account that 2-ply is twice as much toilet paper in the same length piece. So they’re like, “Hey, this is 400 feet of 1-ply for $1, and this is only 300 feet of 2-ply for $1! One-ply is cheaper!”–but the 2-ply is actually 600 feet for $1, because it’s a double layer. Maybe I didn’t need to explain this quite so exhaustively.

We’ve had kids in our household for nearly 8 years now, but it still surprises us that vacation days aren’t vacationy anymore. My husband will have two days off for Thanksgiving, wooo hoooo!, and then at about 8:00 a.m. on the first day we realize what we’re really in for. It shouldn’t still be surprising us at this point, but it still does.

I work at Georgia Tech. I’m SURROUNDED by engineers. Yes, they are all like that.

As for the snow thing/Michigan – it’s totally 60 and sunny here in Michigan today. Has been for almost a week now. But we’re getting your snow on Friday when it drops thirty to forty degrees from the expected high on Thursday. I’ve lived in Michigan for about 99% of my life, but I’m still a huge wuss when it comes to snow.

Delurking to send you Greetings from South Georgia! It was 80 yesterday, and plans on being 80 again here today! Send us some of that snow!

Love the pictures of Riley. He is growing up so fast.

It’s supposed to snow here later this week. CANNOT WAIT!

My family back home in MA has been complaining endlessly that we got snow here first. I pointed out to them it probably won’t snow again all winter. I then put in my order to the weather gods for snow when I go home for Christmas.

And, holy crap – downtown Bellevue last night? A mess. My east coast self couldn’t help but laugh at how confused everyone was by that white stuff falling from the sky. :)

I think you’re losing it. Which makes for a great read! :)

Well, you got your snow day (uh, the one you didn’t want) today, I assume, like the rest of us! Except it’s more of a Stay Home For the Love of God The Streets Are Made of Ice Day. So pretty outside though, dontcha think?!

We are supposed to get snow late tonight and into tomorrow and the following day – with 19 degree highs! I love snow days.

And the parents, and the heat. Mine do the same thing for the love of george.

i watched some of the football game with my bf last night and it really was coming down in seattle! i mean, for seattle. ;p

i moved to nyc last february and it snowed the next weekend, i mean blizzard snow- record 27 inches in central park. i remember thinking of how fun it would be for my bf and i to have a day in and then monday came and everyone went to work. ny’ers are work horses. so unreal. being from boston that much accumulation so would have resulted in at LEAST TWO days off. haha.

nothing to do with snow…..but I saw this in person over the weekend and immediately thought of you and Riley.

http://babystyle.com/common/dProductDetail.asp?SIND=1&PMId=20247&cmCL=srch-octopus

so damn cute.

Sooooo I have to ask: what with you working and having the boy and the holidays and all… surely you have time to write more fiction? (Haha, suuuuure.) Short stories? I loved Fiction Friday. Of all the blogs I read daily yours is by far my favorite. You never disappoint, and if my own son (WHO WILL BE 1 NEXT MONTH HOLY HOLY HELL!) doesn’t let me get my daily blog fix for some reason I always make it a point to read yours. (Kiss ass much?) But really… write a book or something already. Geeezus.

1. I run a business with my husband – an accountant – and my brother in law – an engineer: my days are filled with geeky silliness.

2. Even if it isn’t much, I’d take some of that snow (as long as they don’t cancel school, but of course the will because, if we see ONE FLAKE, it shuts everything down for a week!) Christmas would just seem a lot more Christmas-y with it.

3. Partial snowy afternoon! Snausages! :) Disturbing yet funny.

I married an engineer, they are often that combination of charming/annoying.

Snausage! I’m immediately incorporating that into my dialect….“Hey baby, want to snausage?”

Reminds me of a meeting I was at the other day where they were debating buying new exercise balls for the Seniors centre. Apparently the old balls had been squeezed and loved to the point they were flaking away. I could not keep a straight face.

I almost fell off of my chair laughing. Your entry was hilarious. Also, the snow thing – I’m an Atlanta native and they shut the city DOWN with even the slightest hint of a “snowstorm” arriving. And with snowstorm, I actually mean, maybe a quarter inch of slushy, sort-of-frozen stuff.

Snausage – haha, you’re funny.

Glad you had a happy Thanksgiving and got home safely. We spent our Thanksgiving at home, with about a bajillion people dropping in for 4 days. I was ready for a vacation from my holiday.

The HBO documentary you mentioned, Thin, is available On Demand. It’s really, really interesting to watch it several times. The filmmaker does an amazing job of developing certain themes. You can see how Polly is an alpha female who creates her own inverse authority that mirrors that of the staff (e.g., her smokeporch rules are the opposite of staff rules). It’s like she wants to be the winningest, most high achieving patient *and* the coolest, most popular bad girl. It’s also interesting to see what institutions do to people, how the tiniest infraction (the half-eaten veggie burger) turns into this major drama, with accusations, tearful confrontations, outrage, and finaly, finally, the shameful confession. (It’s just a goddam veggie burger, but they act like it’s a nuclear missile.) The world of the institution is so tiny, so distorted that ordinary perspective is completely lost — e.g., everyone seems to take it absolutely seriously when a staff person says that smoking in the bathroom is a “major safety issue.” (Huh? I mean, I don’t smoke, I think it’s nasty & smelly & bad for your health, but “a major safety issue”? I suppose there’s a SLIGHTLY inreased risk of fire, but they act like illicit smoking in the bathroom poses the same threat to the center that an IED does to soldiers in Iraq.) What got me was the process of humiliation and deprivation of privacy that was inflicted on the patients, as though the purpose of the center was to strip them of their personalities as well as their disorders. I kind of felt, at the end, “well, of COURSE they all go back to starving, bingeing and purging. That grotesquely artificial structure that forced them to behave as though they didn’t have eating disorders made them gain a little weight but it didn’t heal them.”

I’m with you on the Engineers, I’ve worked with them for years both in Environmental and Petroleum Engineering. It doesn’t phase me one bit when one stands up to draw a diagram on their white board in the middle of a conversation to illustrate something for me, or write out an equation for me (and I’m talking about during idle chit-chat type conversations!).

I had to use one-ply the entire time I was in Paris, because anything else, and the toilet would clog up for forever, and their toilets are a weird D-shape, so the O-shaped plunger clashes, and let me tell you, you can only splash yourself with toilet water so many times before you develop a solidly healthy hatred of all things the least bit sewage-related, and in addition to that, my toilet HUMMED (in all caps, no less) every time it flushed, and when it was clogged up, it would do that every 5-10 minutes for 2 minutes at a time until such time as the building pressure finally flushed whatever was in the pipes out, and every time the HUMMING re-commenced, it got louder and louder and louder, until I swear to god, I really thought the whole fucking thing was going to explode in my tiny little bathroom, and I would be picking feces out of everything whilst shrieking in horror and repugnancy and then sobbing as I tried to find someone, anyone, who could speak fluent enough english to understand my problem. And you have no idea how badly I wish that was an exaggeration, but sadly, it isn’t. Let me just sum up by saying holy GOD, I was happy to get back to America and two-ply and my safely functioning toilet.

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