It is a time to be thankful. Very, very thankful, We live in Portland, southeast Portland to be specific. This part, and I do not know why, is a stable part of Portland. We rarely have power outages only one time for an extended period. And that was during the summer. And it was an intentional power outage. Someone had ruptured a gas line so they shut down the electricity while makéng sure it was fixed without blowing up anything. Other than that summer outage we have had a few intermittent outages lasting for a few minutes at the most.
News reports that 200,000 people were out of electricity. Some, like my sister and nephew, are still out of electricity. My sister reported that she may not get her power restored until Monday. And it has already been out for hours. How can they do anything?
You saw the photo of our street yesterday. It looked like we had three inches of snow. Yet today the governor declared an emergency for nine counties in Oregon, including Multnomah, where I live. How does three inches turn into an emergency? It is a bit of a misnomer to call it a snowstorm. What we had was a rainstorm that froze and got a coating of snow over it. So it was really an ice storm. We have a blanket of ice. Covered by snow. It is great if you like to skate. Not great if you are a transport kind of person. Example: our public transit place shut down the entire system. No busses, no trains, nothing.
We are so lucky. Power is on. We have food. We picked up our niece from the airport while it was still rain turning into snow. We are eating well and having a great time together. Unlike so many others,
— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm