For those not local, maybe you already heard that we got some snow recently. Actually, rather a lot. They're predicting another few inches tomorrow, too.

(And yes, I have photo evidence, if I can ever get the photos cleaned up and processed.)

The snow played merry hell with the lives of a lot of people, what with the unplowed roads and canceled flights and icy hills and general western-Massachusetts-style winter, but on the whole bubblesutonium and I were extremely fortunate. We live on a flat street. Our winter supplies include a good snow shovel, a supply of road salt and kitty litter, and a 4x4 Jeep, so we were never truly housebound. We had no travel plans. Everyone who came to visit us made it in and out safely. We're still trying to clean out the refrigerator from all the food we'd stocked up.

Which was good. This was the weekend bubblesutonium graduated, magna cum laude, from Seattle University's law school. All hail the doctor of laws. Sometimes, four years of hard work truly does pay off. Her beaming smile as she walked across the stage made everything worth it.

It was a good weekend despite, or in some cases because of, the weather. bubblesutonium got in her long-planned graduation dinner, though with a few empty chairs. (For those who weren't able to make it: you were missed.) Museum-hopping plans were canceled in favor of long walks through snow-covered streets with a camera. The hills echoed with the shrieks of the kids sledding in the closed-off streets. A flock of snow geese, never before seen in my neighborhood, gathered in the local park.

To my absolute delight, I got in a few hours of urban cross-country skiing through the local neighborhoods. That first night, with the deepest snow, I went skiing through a hushed and still Washington arboretum, watching the snow fall through the trees and obscure the tracks I was leaving behind. Perfect crystalline beauty.

And we haven't even gotten to Christmas Eve yet. The holiday is still to come.

Peace to you and yours. Every day brings us a little more light.

I've spent about six hours thus far today soaking wet, and no, I wasn't having fun at the time.

After that light snowfall on Saturday, it's been raining more or less non-stop ever since. Even for Seattle, this is excessive. How excessive? SeaTac Airport has had 5.25 inches of rain in the last 72 hours, as of noon today, and it's showing no signs of stopping. That's almost 15 percent of the rain we're supposed to get all year.

Some of you may remember last year when our back yard was trashed and our basement flooded by a sudden rainfall. That's because there's a creek just up the hill from us that drains into a single (large) storm drain. If the drain clogs, all that water lands in our back yard and basement.

When bubblesutonium woke me up this morning at first light and told me to check, the drain was 80% clogged with an enormous quantity of sand and sediment. Quite a bit of it had already washed into our street. (That's the same thing that happened last year. When enough of the sediment landed in our street, the water just slid right over it and ended up going down my driveway instead of draining properly.)

Three of my neighbors already had water in their basements.

My neighbors who have lived here for many years are dumbfounded. "We went twenty years without seeing flooding like this," they keep saying.

I've been spending most of the day trading shifts with one of my neighbors, keeping an eye on the other houses on our street, keeping the drainage clear with shovels and hoping against hope that we don't have a repeat of last year's flood. It's cold, wet work, soaking me to the skin even with the best Seattle raingear I can find. So far (knock on wood) we've avoided water in the basement. I don't know how much longer we're going to be able to keep this up though.

I shouldn't complain. There are people who have it a lot worse. The Washington coast (and probably my parents on their island) got hammered with a 100 MPH wind storm on top of the rain. They're still reeling. I'm hearing story after story of power outages, flooded basements, overflowing creeks, sandbags that didn't work, cars buried in mudslides, on and on and on.

For the locals: please, be very careful getting home tonight.

I was absorbed in a video game when I heard the sound of water *pouring* off of the roof. I've only seen rain like this once or twice before, usually in Arizona during monsoon season. The rain was coming down, not in sheets, but in such a high volume that it looked like water pouring from a tap.

"Huh," I thought, and went back to my game.

In retrospect, that wasn't the most brilliant strategy I've ever had.

There's a creek up the hill from us in the nearby park. It's supposed to drain into a series of sumps that carry the water out to Portage Bay. Unfortunately, the drain was blocked, and the entire volume of this overflowing, cascading creek, was pouring down....into our house lot.

I didn't notice any of this until one of the neighbors asked if I had any water in my basement.

Why yes, I discovered. Yes I did.

Actually, it wasn't bad. It's an unfinished basement, so the half inch or so of standing water and mud wasn't nearly the disaster that it could have been. I got a sump drain in the basement unclogged, borrowed a wet vac from the neighbor, and Bubbles and I got the basement mostly cleaned up. We're letting it dry out tonight. I should be able to sweep up the rest of the debris in the morning.

The real disaster was the back yard. The koi pond is choked with mud and debris. I had to turn off the pump to avoid getting it even more gunked up, so if the koi aren't dead yet, they will be soon. (I'm more upset about losing the koi than anything else. Damn, that sucks.) About half of the gravel in the back washed away. We've lost our back fence, which collapsed into the neighbor's yard. In the front, about half of my neighbor's gravel driveway landed in the cul-de-sac in front of our house, so the street right in front of us is a muddy mess of soil and gravel, about three or four inches deep.

It could have been a lot worse. At least one of our neighbors had eight inches of water in his basement. Our neighbor behind us, whose lot is lower than ours, has water in their basement and our fence.

There's an enormous volume of water just up the hill from us, runoff from Capitol Hill being held in place by a road bed. If we have a slide, life could get entertaining again, but for now we should be OK. Except for my koi. Dammit.

Ah well. Thank God this didn't happen last week when Bubbles and I were still working on finals.