Brandon Notices

Who is responsible putting sand on the roads after it snows? I suppose that would be the Department of Transportation. The weather's been getting colder, and I've recently been hearing on the news about de-icers and sand being used on the roads.

Last winter, they dumped heaps of sand on the steep hill outside my cul-de-sac. For some reason, I suppose this makes it safer to drive on. It was pointless, though, because nobody in their right mind would want to drive on that hill anyway, especially when they could just go around the block instead.

It made for some very disgusting brown, gritty snow. After the snow was melted and gone, there was still the slippery sand on the hill for months. Cars or people walking on the hill would skid on the sand. After the snow was gone early this year, we called them to ask if they'd be cleaning the sand off the road, since it now seemed to make it more dangerous. But they said they'd be keeping the sand on the road in case it snowed again.

It wasn't until late spring or even summer when a street cleaner went up and down the hill and finally removed the stuff. I don't want them to sand the hill. I bet I couldn't stop them, though...

I wish people would stop complaining about the heat! Does everybody really want to go back to this situation???

It's snowing out. What?? WHY? It's been spring for more than a week now!

It's not fair! I'm sure there's a reason why we label seasons the way we do! Summer means abundant sun. Autumn means colored leaves. Winter means cold cold cold cold cold. Spring is supposed to free us from winter's mean grasp, but I guess this just isn't the case this year. Waaaah!

I suppose the groundhog has been more correct this year than ever before.

Look at that! What is that? It looks awfully familiar! Oh, yeah, I remember. That thing is the sun!

It has been a while since we've had nice, sunny weather. My thermometer is currently reading a temperature of about sixty degrees, which happens to be my threshold for calling the weather warm.

I'm starting to think that the groundhog lied to us. Stupid fucking groundhog... He told us to expect weeks more of winter. And here we are today with spring-like weather.

But you know what? I'm not ready to rule out the possibility that there will be no more winter. I'm not ready to get my hopes up yet. There certainly is a chance that the cold will return.

It is very windy out!



This is what happens when you don't take the necessary precaution of tying down your trees.

IT'S GROUNDHOG DAY!



Boooooooooooooooooooo. Stupid Groundhog. Why is everyone cheering for you? Go back in your hole.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, and like many of you, I am going absolutely crazy, anticipating whether Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow.

If the groundhog sees his shadow, it means that we are doomed to live through another six weeks of this living hell winter. If he doesn't see his shadow, boom, automatic spring.

I don't know about you, but I sure could go for an early spring this year. I am literally sick of winter. I had to stay home today, I'm so sick.

My groundhog prediction:

HE WON'T SEE HIS SHADOW.

Of course, I have a bias, because I want him to not see his shadow.

Unfortunately, Phil has a tendency to see his shadow. Of his 112 past predictions, he has seen it 98 times. Last year, he didn't see his shadow, but the seven years before, he saw it.

In terms of his prediction accuracy rate, I see vary wavering figures. According to Wikipedia, he is correct 37 to 90 percent of the time.

For the past few days, it's been bitingly cold outside, which sucks, because I hate the cold. It was 20 degrees this morning. Brrrr! I have to pack my backpack with gloves, a hat, and ear warmers. Also, I don't like wearing a big coat. I don't understand how some people can stand to wear shorts in this weather, but I've seen it several times at the university.

My birthday is this Saturday, and the last two times I threw a party, snow threatened to force my guests to stay home. Fortunately, none of my parties have ever been ruined by snow, but it kinda makes me wish that I had a summer birthday. I'd love to have a party at a park, but I know that in January, nobody at my party would be happy. A summer birthday would also mean better presents. People have been asking for a week what they should get me; I've been telling them that I don't know, and it's because I just already got a lot of great presents for Christmas.

I was just outside, carrying stuff out to the recycle bin, and I noticed that the stars are very visible. They are bright and sharp and pretty. Normally, when I try to look at the stars during summer nights, it's too hard to see them. But tonight, it's very clear outside. Why is it that the only time it's good to see the stars is when it's too cold to look?

The weekend snow diversion was quickly washed away by the rainstorm we had today. It rained so much that the reading on my rain gauge is off the charts!

Our driveway slopes down toward the house, and a puddle of such magnitude has grown that water trickled in under the garage doors and left a little layer of water on the floor. I don't think anything of extreme important has been damaged, but boy oh boy, is the weather rainy!

Now the rain's started up again, and it's as heavy as ever! And the worst part: I just busted my umbrella!

This isn't the first snow of the season (it snowed a little while earlier this week), but this is the first time the snow is sticking to the ground, so the neighbor kids asked me to come outside to help them make a snowman. Of course, any time I tried to do anything to the snowman, they told me to stop it because I would ruin the snowman. Of course, they themselves knocked the thing over three times while trying to build it. Jesse, Jeanina, and Patrick kept arguing over what to do about the snowman, and every time they began to disagree, one of them would hit the snowman and knock out a big chunk of it or tip the whole thing over.

An argument over whether to use tree needles as hair resulted in the snowman wearing a baseball cap. He has a baby carrot for a nose because nobody has any regular carrots, and he has rocks for eyes because Jeanina didn't feel like running inside to get buttons. I suggested we use tree branches for arms, but Jesse declared that to be a stupid idea, so he ran and got some thin wooden slats, which I personally think look hilariously out of place. He has a twig for a mouth, and instead of having a corncob pipe, he is... sucking on a straw? I'm not sure what the straw is there for.

On a separate note, I'm not sure that my rain gauge will work very well for measuring how much snowfall we get.

Yesterday, we had a windstorm that was super-duper hyped up by the local media. It was really windy, but it was also really fun, too.

I first went outside after I heard the wind knock the recycle bin over and spill all the junk in the yard. Then I went outside with a little wooden propeller toy that I got last year at the Museum of Flight. It's a little propeller on a dowel that you spin really fast between your palms and release into the air. I was able to make it go a hundred feet or so. Jesse and Alyssa, my neighbors, tried a few times, but they couldn't really make it go up in the air.

Then, I got a beach ball four feet in diameter, and while I started blowing that up, my dad tried to fly a kite. It worked okay for a little while, but the wind was blowing it down too much. He stopped when he hit the neighbor's new car.

After I finished blowing up the ball, Dad and I tried to play catch with it. I would throw the ball one way, and the wind would pick it up and push it back to me. It was difficult not only because the wind was messing around with it, but also because it's hard to catch such a big ball. We also tried kicking it over the roof, but even with the wind's assistance, it was really difficult.

My neighbor Harold was returning from work, and thought it was funny to see us playing with the big ball in the windstorm. While he was talking to Dad, I got some bubbles out from the garage. As soon as I would pull the bubbly wand out of the giant bottle, countless bubbles would stream from the end of the wand and float quickly up and away. Dad and Harold seemed to use the bubbles to find how they should kick the ball. Dad held the ball in place, and Harold ran up and kicked it, and it flew up onto the roof. It lingered a little on our side of the roof, but then another gust of wind carried it all the way over to the other side.

I decided it would be fun to release a smaller beach ball into the wild to see how far it could go. Jesse and Alyssa were very excited about this project. I blew up the ball and wrote my e-mail address in permanent marker, along with a request to e-mail me about the ball if found after the storm. Jesse took the ball and threw it down the street.

This morning, I received an e-mail from someone who had found the ball. I was a litle disappointed that the intersection she had given me was only a block away from here, but the interesting thing was that it wound up a block uphill (and it's a steep hill). I only just recently replied to the e-mail, so I'll update here if I get any new information.

I thought I'd point out in case you hadn't noticed that the weather today has surpassed any weather we've experienced so far this year. Yesterday was pretty good too. Of everyone I know, my cat is the person who most likes sunny weather most. I'm sure that when I walk in through the front door when I get home, he will make a mad dash for the door, but I've gotten pretty good at stopping him. (He wants to eat the grass, but it makes him puke, so we try to limit his intake.) The thing I like most about warm weather is the fact that it prevents cold weather; as I'm sure you know, I hate coldness. It sucks, no explanation necessary. But no coldness today! It's really nice out. It's probably 80, though I haven't measured. I've said before that the weather is acceptable only if it can heat the inside of a car to above the "comfort" level. So, yeah, it's getting real warm out. It's nice to
have a change.

It's very windy outside. I was just walking to the HUB from my chem lecture and a big gust of wind caught the blue canopy tent of a group set up outside (to hand out study bibles). The canopy blew completely upside-down. It looked like it was going to strike a couple people, but it didn't. They fixed the canopy and it looks like no harm was done.

Today, we had a fire drill. I had been expecting it all day—Steffi had told me about it this morning. Ms. Thomas also knew about it, and told us at the beginning of AP Chem that we'd be having the fire drill during her class. As the clock ticked closer and closer to 10:15, we grew anxious because whee! the fire alarms would begin going off. I was bracing myself, expecting the loud, ear-piercing wail of the alarm, but when it started, I really didn't think it was very loud.

We all stepped outside; it was pretty cold out. Of course, I was prepared and had my coat on. Several people were excited because it was snowing a tiny bit. A girl standing nearby was trying to catch the snow in her mouth.

After the fire drill, we all went inside, and my class continued working on our assignment. Many of us were distracted, however, by the increase of the rate of falling snow. It wasn't long before it was a lot of snow falling! Ms. Thomas grew increasingly frustrated with the class's distraction.

During lunch, I bought a bag of Baked Cheetos from the vending machines. They're good, but not as good as Baked Doritos. Also during lunch, there were a lot of people standing outside in the snow, because yay, snow.

After lunch was Astronomy, and the class had a hard time concentrating. People asked Mr. Landon if we could study snow, or perhaps go outside and have a field study (perhaps "examine" the sky today).

Sure, Monday was pretty cold. M.J. McDermott promised us snow, so of course, everyone was hyped up about the expected snow day that Tuesday was to bring, right?

No. One person who was not hyped up was me. I didn't want to get my hopes up. It always happens. You stay up all night, hoping it will snow and that school will be cancelled for the day. Then you wake up the next morning, dash to the window, tear through the blinds, and you're Extremely Depressed to find that the ground is completely snowless. Or even worse, when there's like an inch or two on the ground, then you turn on the TV but your school's name doesn't appear on the school closure list. So you drudge along to school, wishing that you'd rather be home eating cinnamon sticks or whatever it is you do on snow days. It's not that I didn't want it to snow—snow is good—it's that I was choosing to not believe the weather forecasts and expect normal weather for today so as to not get my hopes up. I didn't want to get let down by sunny weather.

On Monday, everyone at school was giddy, jumping up and down with excitement in anticipation that school would be closed today. After all, practically every news station was predicting at least three days of snowfall, with an inch or two accumulation Tuesday morning. People were psyched! In ASL, Jasmine kept telling me how excited she was about the snow. When Ms. Hess asked her to close the blinds because the sunlight was in her eyes, Jasmine opened the window to check if the temperature was cold enough to snow. Ms. Hess signed to her that NO, it's not going to snow!

On MySpace, the eagerness for snow was all that people were posting bulletins about. Megan posted a bulletin trying to persuade readers to do a little snow dance, like a rain dance, to encourage the clouds to make snow. She and I exchanged messages about how I was trying not to get excited about the possibility of snow, and she said I needed to be more optimistic. I told her how I felt better off being pessimistic.

So of course, it started snowing last night. I didn't notice until Kevin sent me an instant message about it.

This morning, when I arose, I ran to the window and was disappointed to see that there was no snow on the ground. I suppose it's just as well—last winter, it didn't snow until January 7th. And it was a Friday night, so it's not like there was any chance of school closure anyway.

I guess no matter how hard you try not to hope for anything, you always feel let down.

It's been foggy recently! VERY foggy! Let's see... it started on Thursday or Friday, and it's been foggy ever since then! The Weather Channel says that we have an air stagnation advisory; we're not supposed to burn fires in our fireplace because the fog is clogging up the fireplace and the smoke will have nowhere to go. According to weather.com, we should expect to see fog all through Tuesday.

Fog is eerie. It would have been so cool if it were lingering around during Halloween or something like that. That would have been better.

I saw the new Harry Potter movie today. It was pretty good, but I liked the last one a bit more... I don't know, I guess I just have a thing for enjoying temporal anomalies.

Short but big thunderstorm today. The rain was falling really really hard—the Weather Channel's Doppler radar had this huge red blob headed across Lynnwood. The thunder was very loud, and my poor kitty cat was horrified. He was crouching on the ground, and I picked him up, and he was so tense! Poor kitty.

So much weather stuff going on. Weather's getting a bad rep. Let's see... Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, and now Otis is planning on striking Arizona. An article on James' blog had me thinking about how everybody's gotten a turn with bad weather, and it should be our turn next. Earthquakes make me nauseous. I don't know, I guess all disasters are bad. I feel kinda bad for the people living in my SimCities. There were times when numerous volcanoes would rise from the earth, several UFOs would invade the city, lightning would strike five times per second all over the place, and fire would just spread from out of nowhere. Earthquakes would roar five times a minute, and four or five tornadoes would tear up the city at a time. The population would drop to zero, and every building not destroyed in the disaster would get abandoned. What a rough day for my Sims.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was, once again, preempted for a wonderfully boring baseball game. This is the second time in this season's run that this has happend, and we're only four episodes into it. At this rate, I'll have no idea what's happening half the time.

Ah, that reminds me. Our class's theme for homecoming at Meadowdale High School this year is Ninja Turtles. How fun! The freshmen have Ghostbusters, the sophomores have Super Mario, and the juniors got stuck with Scooby-Doo. During the assembly, the girl demonstrating what to wear during class theme day was dressed up as a turtle, spinning a nunchuck above this head; this surprised a lot of people. Two girls sitting behind me yanked out their Student Handbooks and pointed out to everyone sitting around that it distinctly says no "nun-chu-ka sticks." So the ASB's example might inadvertantly lead seniors to bring weapons to school. Don't let some guy poke your eye with a sai!

I jumped off of the treadmill yesterday and ran into the dining room, and somehow accidentally slammed my right knee into the edge of the surface of the table. So, if you noticed me limping around school today, it's because my knee hurts. I don't think it's broken; indeed, I think it's feeling much better now. Who knows, perhaps it'll be fully healed by tomorrow.

So, I've been watching The Weather Channel a bit recently. Looks like our decent weather is about to take a turn for the worse. The forecast predicts rain every day for the next week. That stinks. Hopefully, those more distant days' predictions are less accurate, but I could see in the clouds today that they're ready to rain all over us.

My next-door neighbors' black lab puppy, Mandy, has been getting into so much mischief lately! For some reason, her leash always gets let go, or she jumps over her little kennel, and runs into Harold's yard, which is on the other side of my house. Harold hates dogs in his yard, and I sometimes hear him yelling "GO! SHOO! GO, DOG!" through my bedroom window, even when it's shut. I'm fine with Mandy in our yard as long as she doesn't poop in our grass like all the neighbor dogs did all the time years ago.

Jesse, the youngest child, had Mandy on a leash, and was trying to teach her to "sit" and "come" when I walked out to get the mail, but Mandy wasn't listening to him. I had remembered something I had recently read, which said that unlike humans, who think of everybody as equals, dogs think of themselves in two categories: "leader" and "follower". I told Jesse that if he doesn't make Mandy think he's the leader, she won't obey him, and will instead think that she's the boss of him!

It doesn't snow much here, but, well, it finally snowed! The news channels had been taunting all us students for a week, but it finally snowed on Friday night. Well, we didn't miss school, but at least it snowed. Friday night, while my cousin Kevin was over, we noticed snow falling under the street light. We ran outside to play in the snow. Stephanie wouldn't join us because she's always talking to her friends online. There was only less than half an inch of snow, so the only practical thing we could do was make drawings in the snow. First, I made a hopscotch, then we played Hangman and Kevin wrote "oops" in the snow by shuffling his feet around. Just to be funny, I put a "P" before the "oops" and guess what it became. Thaaaat's right.

It snowed much more overnight today. We have probably two inches, which is actually quite a bit for this area. There were kids sledding down the steep hill in front of our cul-de-sac. Cars have to be careful not to hit any of the stupid kids that don't move out of the way. Kevin, Stephanie, my neighbors, and I had a snowball fight. This one guy, Zach, who I don't think lives around here, was a jerk. He pulled my hat off. Oh, then later, he rolled the snowman body over Stephanie's hat. I tried to help by pulling her hat out—I grabbed the little pom-pom ball sewn to the top of the hat, but instead of pulling the hat out, I just yanked the pom-pom off. How embarrassing.

That afternoon, Stephanie had a surprise party to go to, and Kevin and I had to take her to the Azteca in Mukilteo. While we were in the area, waiting to pick her up, we ate at Pizza hut, and shared a medium pizza. Then we went to RadioShack, and then RiteAid, where we saw a hilarious 4-foot singing, dancing Santa Claus. He was marked 75% off since the holiday season was over, bringing the price down to about $20. It was too funny—Kevin had to buy it. He plays several songs, and one funny thing is that you can plug the included microphone into it, and Santa's mouth will move along with your voice. It's fun.

I've been watching The Weather Channel a bit recently. I like their description for the weather we might have here on Monday:



THUNDER SNOW! Yikes! And the low on Wednesday—watch out! Brrrr.

Everybody's been hoping that it snows soon. The weather reports have said for a week now that it's supposed to snow today and Friday. Nobody knows. I heard some people at school say that if it snows, and they don't call it a snow day, they still aren't going to go to school. (If it snows an inch but the road conditions are fine, we still go to school.)

I just heard on the Weather Channel that a winter storm watch has been issused for our area. But I bet it won't be as bad as it has been in Kansas. People literally have to break into their cars—they had to break the ice to open the doors.