But this has been a bad week for riding the bus, which I do every day, to and from work.

Wednesday morning (New Year's Eve) we woke up to about 3 inches of snow on the ground. I got up at my normal time, got ready, and started heading to the bus stop (about a half mile walk) a bit earlier than normal. As I was walking up the street, I was thinking that I probably should have left a little later, since the bus will probably be late because of the snow (Seattle does not handle snow well -- it'll shut down in conditions that most cities hardly notice). Half a block away, I see my bus fly by the stop, not even slwing down because there was no one at the stop. Damn. Luckily my wife was able to drive me in.

Today, we had another snowfall, but they tried to do the right thing by putting de-icing fluid on the roads overnight. Unfortunately, we had a brief thaw before dawn, and then the wind made the bridges re-freeze, washing off all of the de-icer, and creating these wonderful skating rinks on the bridges. In West Seattle, there is only one way out of the area to the north, and that's the West Seattle Bridge. There's a smaller, lower bridge, but it's a drawbridge, and it's only one lane in each direction.

I caught my bus at the normal time, but as we were approaching the turnoff to go to the bridge, you guessed it, they closed it. So now all of the morning commute traffic is trying to squeeze onto this little lower bridge, causing the expected backups. I normally get dropped off downtown at about 8:15am, today it was 10am.

Glad I skipped the coffee.

On the other hand, while we were slowly making our way down to the lower bridge (okay, let's be honest, we were parked on the street), the same tow truck went by us about 4 times, each time pulling a car with the airbags deployed. So I can be certain that other people were having mornings far worse than I.

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