Snowpocalypse 2013

Scenes from the snow day today. It doesn't rank among our top ten Snowpocalypses, to be brutally frank about it. It's no 2008 or 2007. It's not even a 2010. Still: Two cheers for (light & temporary) snow!

snowy plateaus, eastern oregon

february snow, 2011 edition

As usual, all of this melted shortly after I took these. And, as usual, the office was open, and I live way too close to work to plausibly use this as an excuse to stay home. But nearly all of my meetings today were cancelled for lack of attendees other than yours truly, thus I managed to spend a big chunk of the day actually writing code for a change, so... Mission Accomplished!

Why I'm getting on a plane for the holidays

Here's a video I took around this time last year, trudging through ice and snow and slush in downtown Portland, wielding an iPod nano and trying not to fall over. It really wasn't all that much snow, but it was quite slippery and hard to walk in, hence the heavy breathing towards the end of the video, for which I'd like to apologize in advance. I'm sure it didn't help that I'd spent the entire day in meetings, leveraging proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis. Also, it was uphill the whole way. Also, it was my birthday and dinner plans were cancelled due to the snow. A supremely crappy day all around.

So this year the plans are a little different, and involve vacation and a plane to somewhere a bit more tropical. Stay tuned.

reflect-o-snow

snow day, hawthorne bridge

snow squeee

Winter, Powell Butte

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I wandered out to Powell Butte a couple of weeks ago, during the post-Ultra-Snowpocalypse thaw. I had the day off, so I thought it might be fun to go out and wander around the place and maybe take a few photos, as is my way. I used to go there a lot, years ago, for the mountain bike trails, but it'd been a very long time since I'd gone. As I walked around, I got to thinking and realized it'd been close to 15 years. That (plus a recent birthday) kind of got me down. The cold, windy, bleak landscape didn't help a lot either. When you're 23 or so, it's only natural to feel like an insignificant part of a pointless universe. It can even feel kind of artistic and sophisticated, and you can get a lot of mileage out of wandering around this sort of landscape, brooding, wearing black if possible. It's like walking through an indie rock album cover. Any photos you take just might end up as your next album cover. Add another 15 years or so, and feeling pointless and insignificant is no longer quite so much fun.

I quickly realized I would've been happier if I'd done something completely different that day.



But enough about me. At least I got some photos out of the excursion, and some of them even turned out ok, I think, maybe.

Powell Butte used to be one of my favorite spots in the city. I'm not sure it still is, but there certainly isn't anything like it in the area. There are quite a few other volcanic hills around town, mostly around the eastside -- Mt. Tabor, Rocky Butte, Kelly Butte, etc., and Mount Sylvania and maybe a couple of others on the westside. The whole thing's a city park, the second largest in town after Forest Park. Or more precisely, there's a middling-sized park here surrounded by a vast chunk of land owned by the Water Bureau. Somewhere around here there's a vast underground water reservoir, and much of Powell Butte is reserved for future expansion. Above ground, most of the park is kind of an open, gently rolling grassland, very much unlike the densely forested other buttes around town. Nice place to walk around, or bike, or even ride your horse, assuming you have a horse, which I don't. It's maybe not as dramatic and photogenic as some other places around town, though. You might've noticed how many of these photos incude wide swaths of sky, full of low, fast, black clouds. I really tried to be inspired by all that vast brown grass, but I just wasn't feeling it for some reason. Beats me.



More about Powell Butte, from all across the intertubes:

• Wikipedia
• Portland Water Bureau
• everything2
• Friends Of Powell Butte
• The city's Powell Butte Project mostly focuses on potential fire hazards here.
• US Geological Survey. They say Powell Butte is a cinder cone, versus most of the other mini-volcanic bits around town which are "lava domes". A lava dome is where the earth sort of expands into a big festering zit, without actually exploding. With a cinder cone, it's all-out Clearasil time. It's funny, though, Powell Butte seems to have a much gentler landscape than the mere lava domes around town. If anything, the open grassland parts remind me a little, just a little, of the slopes of one of the big shield volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii. Except obviously much smaller, and with less desirable weather.
• A recent post at Neig
hborhoodNotes about new trail construction on Powell Butte.
• Portland Ground (with better photos than mine, as usual)
• John Rakestraw has more photos, again far superior to my humble offerings. Photos of Mt. Hood, birds, and even a coyote. I don't have any of those here, I'm afraid.

ice, razor wire

You want snowpocalyptic? I've got your snowpocalyptic right here.

Ultra-Snowpocalypse™ 2008 II : The Sequel

It's come to my attention that the last batch of photos really wasn't all that snowpocalyptic, all things considered. It's probably fair to say this batch isn't very snowpocalyptic either, really. But hey.

The above photos were taken right around "sunset" the other day, and the river really was that color, briefly.



Here's something you don't often see: Seagulls floating down the Willamette, on a chunk of drifting ice.




A crappy snowman I made the other day while waiting for the bus. Once it was "done", a family showed up to wait for the bus, and the kids thought it was adorable. A "baby snowman", they called it, and they built it a friend. Their snowman was much, much better than mine.








Ice on the bus shelter, from the same wait for the bus. It was a long wait. I actually took these in a hurry just as the bus finally arrived, but I like to think they turned out reasonably artsy anyway. In fact, I feel I deserve a huge government grant to keep churning out reasonably artsy stuff like this. Or a huge grant from a big-name nonprofit, funded by some well-meaning philanthropic patron of the arts. That would be fine too.




City Hall, with someone's "Merry Xmas" message in the snow. It's gotten so whenever I see the word "Xmas", I always think of Futurama and Evil Robot Santa. But that's just me.



The stupid pioneer statue in the Plaza Blocks. I have a draft post about it sitting around half-finished; I'll probably get it done once the snow melts or something.