Now that’s more like it! The snow’s been falling for the past six hours. Fluffy light snow piling up on the tree branching, icing up the roads, and blanketing everything else. Slush-free. The dogs have been frolicking all evening (they seem to get an extra jolt of enthusiasm after the first real snow), chasing each other around the backyard and licking the ground constantly.

Mary and I also ran them at the park tonight in the dark (which wasn’t dark at all in the reflective snow), where there skidded and slipped and ran circles around everything. Later, I pulled out a sled that the previous residents had left behind when they moved and tried out the big hill nearby (literally a sixty second jog from our back fence to the base of the hill). I was surprised to find only a handful of kids out playing. Maybe they don’t do that sort of thing here. I felt a little silly as an adult hurtling headfirst down a hill by myself, but after a few shots of snow down the front of my jacket and an inadvertent bounce over an ice jump it was all good fun again.

I ran back to the house to try to coax Mary out, but she was more than a bit preoccupied with trying to complete a project for work, so I settled for strapping on my snowboard and getting in a few more solo runs.

A couple pictures from today. The first one is of Mary at “work” out at the ranch this afternoon (not a bad gig, hanging with horses). Note the lack of snow, other than some of the foothills in the distance. And picture two is me in the backyard this evening after snowboarding as the snow keeps falling. And some sort of cyborg dog.

Things I am thankful for:

I am thankful that yesterday after the alternator on my car died ($500+) and I was walking home from work into a biting winter wind with no hat on, that when the crazy black dog that I was ignoring as it barked at me, when that dog ran up and bit me on the Achilles tendon as I walked by, that that bite didn’t break the skin more than it did (slightly abraded and a little contused today, but no real blood loss). Thanks!

Oh no! I’m not ready for this yet! We had our first snow last night, reminding me how much I dislike cold and slush (cold and huge mounds of dry fluffy snow I don’t mind quite so much). I guess winters in Yakima are reasonably mild though for the most part. I’m told that you rarely need more than a push broom to handle driveway accumulations. And with legit mountain snow less than an hour’s drive away, that seems like a pretty fair balance.

Shortly after we moved into our new house here in Yakima our dryer stopped working properly. It would blow plenty of air, but wouldn’t heat up. This wasn’t big deal at all during the summer when we could just throw our clothes on a line in the backyard and let the ninety degree heat take care of the rest. So we ignored the problem (I’ve always liked the way my clothes feel and smell drying outside anyway).

Mary was less enthusiastic, especially as the temperatures started to cool this fall and I suggested hanging our clothes on a couple lines of coaxial cable that I strung up in the garage. This weekend we had plenty of rain and temps in the forties and Mary’s less than enthusiastic tolerance had turned into vague rumblings of an imminent purchase of a top of the line washer and dryer set.

So I dug out the tools and took at shot at being an electrician for a day. I bought a multimeter from the Ace Hardware down the street, gave myself a couple of heart-jolting electric shocks, and eventually found two wires tucked into a corner of the dryer that had been cut, presumably by the belt that rotates the dryer drum. It’s always nice when the problem is obvious. A return trip to Ace yielded a couple of replacement wires and disconnect clips that I ended up having to splice together. End of story: a glowing heating element again and a functioning dryer.

I’ve been gathering sickness since yesterday morning. You know how an lcd screen looks when you poke it? Well my skin feels the way that looks if you imagine the colors representing different levels of tingling and coldness when the skin is touched. Also my throat is clenching shut and when I cough to free my vocal chords a throbbing headaches pulsates through my jaw and into my temples. When I do try to talk I sound roughly equivalent to a car tire rolling down a gravel road. Some sort of Hawaiian Plague.

Other than that though, my weekend is going swimmingly. Beautiful sunny fall day today. We had a fairly hearty rain last night that removed at least half of the remaining leaves from our Oak tree. Mary and I built piles of leaves for the dogs to scamper around in and Taylor resumed her puppy ways of barking at and attacking the moving rake. We ran the dogs at the park in the morning, made a library and grocery run before lunch, then spent the afternoon reading, watching college football, and pandering to our dogs Frisbee-catching needs.