Campus Conversations

Seattle Winter Wonderland

January 16, 2012

Winter in Seattle has been mild and un-snowy, until today! Not that snow here is impressive in any way, but it's pretty.

Actually from the 2009 snow storm but, the sentiment is fitting.

Snow in Seattle means everyone's driving 200% slower than usual, which can be frustrating, but it also means you see cars covered in varying depths of snow, which encourages me to guess where they came from. My neighborhood is surrounded on three sides by water so, we only got a few centimeters of snow and a dusting of hail on top of that, but some of the cars I saw while my dad and I were buying closet-storage supplies had snow four inches or so thick!

This morning my dad and I embarked on a small-scale room-improvement project in my closet, attempting to find more storage space for the truly remarkable amount of clothing I have collected over the years. We spent about, three hours at Lowes picking up the right stuff. Eventually we got home, and got to work. Almost the first thing that happened was my dad punched a hole through the drywall, on accident. Then, when we started to put the shelf-holders in, we realized we'd picked up two different depths of holder. Finally, when we went to spackle in the holes we'd drilled, the spackle we had in the house was all dried out, and the hardware stores were all closed. All I can say is, it's lucky tomorrow's a holiday.

Along with my ongoing house-project, I am simultaneously stage managing a high school production of Hamlet and walking my friend's mom's dog while she's out of town. So tomorrow my day looks like; get up before 9:45am, make the half-hour uphill trek to the lucky dog's house, walk him for 15-20 minutes, walk back home, spackle my walls, walk back to the lucky dog's house, walk him, and walk back home again, grab food, drive to the theater, sit through rehearsal from 2-6, return home, finish installing closet, clear mountain of clothing off bed, sleep. That last bit is what's going to make it all worthwhile.

Funny thing about Oxy closets. When I moved into Braun my freshman year (it's the best dorm, I don't care what anybody says) I expected to have enough clothes storage to maybe fit a quarter of my wardrobe. Boy was I wrong. Since second semester of freshman year I have lugged two massive bags back and forth from Oxy to Seattle entirely full of clothing. There is so much storage space in your rooms. I was in a triple last year, and the first few days were tricky, but all three girls (and none of us skimped on the clothes we brought) had enough space to store our stuff. It was pretty amazing.