I wrote this entry about a week ago whilest waiting for my plane at Sea-Tac.

This entry doesn’t exactly hail the halfway point of my year, but I suppose it comes close enough. I’m headed home for Christmas, but it seems like I’ve been living in Seattle forever.  I’m not quite in love with the city, as some other JVs in the area are, but I like it for what it is, a liberal, green, overall pleasant city. The main issue for me is the distance from home; I’ve often said that if you put Seattle in place of Boston, I’d definitely live there. Sometimes, the ridiculousness of the city is enough to make me like it a little more.

The past few weeks, for example, have been a bit silly. I never imagined that three or four days of snow would mean that work would be closed for a week, that half of the buses would shut down, and that the airlines would run out of deicer. Well, I was proven wrong. The city is extremely hilly, for one, making clean-up difficult. Further complicating the problem is that the city refuses to use salt, in fear of endangering the wildlife of Puget Sound. Additionally, the county only owns twenty-something plows, a tiny amount for such a densely populated place. The snow last week, therefore, caused mass hysteria. It was truly unlike another other first snow I have ever seen. On the morning of the first big snow, after I found out work was closed, I sledded with my housemates, at eight in the morning. The city was eerily quiet, and that feeling has held through the past week or so. This statement should not serve to say that Seattleites are loud; in fact, most are pretty calm, in my experience. The quiet, however, gave the city the strange quality of an alien planet, only interrupted by downhill skiers and snowshoers who have taken over the streets. The Core Members at Noah Sealth are stuck in the houses until the snow melts, and I feel badly for them, since they have to miss out on the beauty of this ridiculous snowstorm.

The storm awarded me a few unique opportunities. I had the chance to sled with my housemates. I went downtown for Vietnamese food, which was delicious. I checked out a coffee shop in Madrona Beach that I’ve thought about trying pretty often. Most notably, my journey to the airport today amounts to an epic: I left the house at four. Then, I hauled my baggage downtown to the library, which I couldn’t find for some reason, even though I’ve been there at least five or six times. I actually had to call Beth to find out where it was. After that, I headed to the underground tunnel to catch my bus, which I also struggled to find, making two rotations around Benaroya Hall before I found it. I waited for a bus for about forty-five minutes; I only made it on the bus by chance. The ride to Sea-Tac took about half an hour. I only had time to sit down after checking in and finding someplace to eat. I have never eaten Chinese food so quickly.

Here’s to a week on the East Coast, just in time to eliminate some of the routine.