Buffalo gets two inches of snow in November and everyone's excited because it's pretty. Seattle gets two inches of snow in November and the city becomes a slip n slide, buses and cars turning sideways on hills, people stranded at one another's houses. A toy city. Some people come together like magic and other people kill strangers at intersections in Capitol Hill with hatchets, the always-way of a snowy world, and the fact that extreme weather here happens 22 inches before it happens anywhere else I've ever lived doesn't make it any less extreme.

Last night it took me two hours to walk all the way home from work, and today I had an ice day. The branches of the big fir outside my window were crystallized and the sun shone down all day, today, but the roads were crazy. I worked from my bed and then, as dusk fell, Riisa and Mark and Jesse and I set out across the barren tundra to the Twilight Exit, to procure meatloaf and hot toddies and mint hotchocolate whiskey drinks that also had something like Rumplestiltskin in the name and play Hearts and laugh.

Yesterday I went to do parkour   with Orion and I was not great at it and today I am sore in some pretty bizarre places. I am going to draw a bath, I think, to combat the frigidity of this house, and continue my own cyclic winter comfort habits.