(Admittedly, you might have to pump it out, or [more recently] attempt to drag what's left of your comic-book collection from the sodden wreck of what was once your house, but still....)

We don't have a snowmobile yet, so I waited at the bus stop with the tractor mower. Apparently, any small motorized vehicle will do when it comes to fourth-grade coolness, whether it's in season or not.

Right! And more of the trauma calls involving people I don't know!

Words of advice on that: Trees are not the preferred method of bringing your snowmobile to a stop, and internally mounted alcohol is a bad idea (see above, trees).

I'll go fix it.

From a local employer's January 2001 newsletter:

An unusual snow-machine accident just before Christmas put [redacted] in the hospital for more than three weeks. A three-and-a-half-inch diameter aspen tree plunged completely through [redacted]’s chest after he was thrown off his machine when it hit an obstruction in the trail. He and two friends had been riding their machines near the Old Richardson Highway. Amazingly, as medics used chain saws to cut off lengths of the 16-foot-long tree, [redacted] remained conscious. “I was just trying to keep my cool,” he recalls quietly. [Redacted] underwent more than 20 hours of surgery in three sessions. Doctors removed three ribs to extract the wood from his body. [redacted] also lost part of a lung and his spleen.

All the newspaper accounts I can quickly find are behind paywalls. But, my point is -- be careful out there!

We haven't gotten into the teens of inches - but by the 7th, we had gotten more snow in this December than we had all last December - and a significant portion of January as well - with only 8 - 10 inches of average snowfall in the area.

*Most of which did not need mowing.

We do get snow, but not normally in shovelling quantities. More like, quick-get-the-camera-before-it-melts quantities.

Ever notice that no one mentions spleens except to say they've been removed?

Jim: your conscience is clear. You'd send them a book and encourage them to stay home and read it, if you only knew who they were.

It tended to be allowed to get long.

As for weather, here has been pathetic. Where is the snow to justify the saccharine versse of O Tannebaum?

Not even a decent day of sunshine. Just boggy rain, and teases of crytal clear nights, with hints of snow. All of which fails to turn into decent weather.

Or vented.

In fact, I often do that, particularly when our illustrious president makes a speech.

I dunno, Spleen seems like one of those "inherently funny" words - "I'll eat yer SPLEEN!" is funny. "I'll eat yer HEART!" is piratey.

(Gizzard is another inherently funny word).

I am definitely going to be tired of looking at this by February or so, if it doesn't melt off.

On the other hand, I'm still in the "oooooh, ICICLES!" phase of hibernal acclimation.

No snow around here, boss.

I have the annual snowmachine trip to the edge of nowhere coming up in a few weeks, the annual excursion here. I'm one excited snowmachine driver.

Steve (in currently snowless Sugar Land).

Steve C. @ 33 -- somebody with better knowledge will probably have to correct me, but:
Wet snow is surprisingly heavy. People who take no regular exercise go out and do the equivalent of a hundred squats or deadlifts in quick succession, with perhaps forty pounds of weight on the end of a stick and heavy winter clothes. And no rest in between sets.

It's not the cold -- it's the unaccustomed exercise.

One safety feature: a pin plugged into the dashboard, attached to the driver with a cord. If the driver falls off the machine, the pin is pulled, and the snowmobile comes to a stop. You can easily ride into the woods much further than you'd want to walk back, and you don't want your ride taking off without you.

The downside of the snowmobile in comparison to the dogsled: if you are in an extreme survival situation, you can't eat a snowmobile.

1) You could, if you had to, have the dogs sleep with you for warmth.

2) If a dog is injured you can throw it in the basket and keep on going with a reduced team. If your machine fails*, you might be seriously hosed.

*Who, me? Have a clutch fail on a snowmachine? Of course not . . . Must be some other Tania.

People do have those heart attacks from unaccustomed exercise, often in harsh conditions. (We've already had our first snow-shoveling-related-AMI-of-the-season.)

(People who try to clear jammed snowblowers by sticking their hands inside are a whole-'nother source of emergency medical interest.)

Your spleen is a blood reservoir. It has a function in recycling red cells, and in infection control. In the case of a ruptured spleen--it's highly vascular (which is the medical term for "bleeds like crazy"). Enough spleen cells seem to get away and attach themselves to other abdominal organs to carry out a lot of the spleen's function in adults.

Our one meager snowfall so far has melted, but December on my Japanese print calendar has a lovely Hiroshige of a snowy mountain village. And aside from my view of distant snows, various nearby birds seem quite happy with the frosty morning: finches, sparrows, and the occasional raven (generally flapping madly with no thermals to ride). It's enough to produce a good "seasonal" mood -- as long as I avoid the news.

It just took me three hours to drive home from work. It usually takes me twenty minutes to walk home from work.

Upside: Your snowmobile cannot eat itself.

I actually know a guy who once had to walk about sixty cold February miles up the Yukon River (hungry) because his dogs (also hungry) ate the babiche (rawhide lashing) off his dogsled, reducing it to a bundle of unrelated birch sticks.

He apparently never quite got hungry enough to eat his dogs -- or, if he did, he doesn't tell that part of the story.

We lucked out on the ice, apparently it stayed enough above freezing during the rainy portion of the exercise to glaze the trees but only with less than .25-inch of ice. Today was interesting, it got up to the upper 30s AND was very sunny. Sounded like it was raining outside, only it was chunky rain with whaps and bams in it.

The roads are fine now , my driveway, deck and walk (the most treacherous part of this whole episode) have been salt-treated twice. (Saturday the 8th Margene and I were planning on going to see an IMAX movie and lunch at Union Station, I went out and found I couldn't stay standing while trying to de-ice the cars, our driveway, which is lumpy/bad concrete/gravel mix was Too Icy,)

I saw a piece of cultural dissonance up in the artic--a snowmobile pulling a dogsled.

Yippee, he said dejectedly.

People are being advised to avoid unnecessary travel. I'm currently scheduled to drive a couple of folks to the airport, right in the middle of the mess. The flight is currently flagged as "on time" but we'll see if that continues. I'll make sure I've got some emergency supplies in the car if I do end up going.

I guess we're making up for last year, when I was bicycling on almost-clear streets well into January.

I imagine the governor and mayor are thankful that this one didn't happen on a work day. Just about the entire media went after them Friday ... and when you have two politicians who are not exactly popular at the moment, angry commuters are not going to give them much leeway.

Ever notice that no one mentions spleens except to say they've been removed?

Does anyone else remember alt.spleen?

Even in areas where one is on bedrock, bad things can happen in flood conditions: if you know West Lynn, Oregon, it might be instructive to look into what happened to the rst of Lynn.

The worst damage in the Chehalis floods were people who lived "out in the hills" but, unfortunately, downhill and downstream from big clearcuts (Adna and the Boisfort Valley, for instance) and not so much on what is defined as the Chehalis flood plain- the section of freeway which was flooded is on the 10 year flood plain, and has often flooded before, but the brand-new certified organic dairy which lost hundreds of milk cows and the cheesemaker who lost his herd of milk sheep were in areas which rarely flood at all, and where the rapid rise and velocity of the flood was unlike anything in memory.

Smugly saying "don't build on flood-plains" "don't build in hurricane zones" "don't build in tornado alley" "don't build on earthquake faults" "don't build in the way of wildfires" is a way of ducking the uncomfortable truth that everyone lives in the way of natural hazards: they're different according to where you live, there are better and worse choices to make (personally, I'm pretty sure that the people building a new house next to a place where a landslide has knocked a house into the street and left the foundation full of giant boulders is a bad idea but hey, Laurel Canyon) but a place that is safe for a few hundred years can be knocked flat by lahars (Herculaeum) or tidal waves (locally, Ozette Village).

It is also true, especially in southwest Washington, that the high ground has its own problems- the Willapa and Black Hills are heavily eroded marine basalt, layers of black rock floating on iron-rich red clay, prone to regular massive landslides. And much of the high ground is still in timber production, unavailable to residential development for that reason alone.

(You will note I excluded "do not build on sandy beaches" from my list: this was intentional and meaningful. The ocean always wins).

The rainfall event which caused the flooding in this area dropped 20 inches in 24 hours.

"I'm confident that no one saw a body in there, but the question is why they didn't see it," said Deputy Chief Michel Moore, who is overseeing the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation of the incident.

The state Emergency Medical Services Authority has launched a separate probe to determine whether Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics properly evaluated the accident and provided appropriate care to Steven Williams.

"When questioned if anyone else was in the vehicle, the driver indicated there was no one else," Moore said. "He was conscious, he was breathing, and he was able to respond to questions."

A key question, however, is whether Williams understood what rescuers were asking.

Under Fire Department medical protocols, paramedics have to determine a patient's level of awareness and assess whether he may be impaired by trauma caused from accidents.

State investigators will focus, in part, on how the paramedics assessed Williams and whether they "failed to fully evaluate the scene," said Dr. Cesar Aristeiguieta, director of the EMS authority.

The agency regulates paramedics and can suspend or revoke their licenses for violating medical care standards.
[snipped, emphasis mine]

The accident was Saturday morning. Apparently she died shortly - 'within a few minutes' - after the accident, but they haven't given a cause yet.

Highly reactive basement rock + active orogeny + high average rainfall = unstable slopes prone to catastrophic slides. It's a special case application of Smith's First Law of Civil Engineering: Water always runs down hill.

Of course without the high rainfall you end up with the situation John McPhee describes in Control of Nature when he talks about the fire/landslide cycle in the LA Basin.