Category: Goolsbee News

Snowed in.

The reason the site hasn’t been updated of late is because I’ve been offline. We were hit with a big snowstorm (about 16″-18″ of wet heavy snow… a lot for these parts) and very cold temps, low last night was 11°F, (-11.6°C) and the high yesterday was 18°F (-7°C). Our power is out, which means no heat, no lights, no water. Ironically I do have Internet access as our cable is still working, but honestly blogging is really low on the priority scale right now.

I promise I’ll tell the whole tale once the thaw comes and power is restored.

–chuck

Update on the floodwaters

Sue & the boys spent the night in a hotel in Arlington. I got up this morning and drove down the hill to check on the road. It still has water over it, but they are letting cars through. I called Sue and she’s coming home soon. The rains are still falling, and perhaps the snowmelt has finished in higher elevations, but the weatherman says it could still get worse. Better to be all stranded at home than scattered though, so while they can they are coming home. Arlington Schools have suspended bus service, so for all intents and purposes, this school day has been ‘rained out’.

For those that have asked me, no our home is in no danger. We live at an elevation of around 500′, and the rivers at flood stage are probably 300-400 feet lower than us. If the waters get this high, there are other things to worry about!

Update: 08:40 PST: We’re all together at home now.

Above is a view of some of my OSX dashboard widgets. It looks like the weather will let up tomorrow. The USGS river widget is lacking some useful data, like a timescale or depth measurement! But it does show that the North Fork of the Stillaguamish is really moving (the scale is cubic feet per second). They have no measure near Arlington for the South Fork, which is the one that caused the road to close.

Oh well, I have my Internet access, my IP phone, and my family here, so we’ll be OK.

Stranded.

Both the South and North forks of the Stillaguamish River have overflowed their banks. We live in the Cascade Foothills NE of Arlington. My kids go to school in Arlington. Those two rivers lie between our home and their schools. 🙁

I’m stranded at home. This kids are stranded at school (two different ones several miles apart) and I can’t get in touch with my wife, who is 20 miles away in Mt. Vernon.

Here are some more pictures.

Update: 15:40 PST: The rain has let up. It is still windy. Sue finally called me and is heading towards the schools. I have no idea if she’ll be able to get back tonight though. Both of the western approaches to our area, SR530 and Jordan Road up from Granite Falls are closed. The only other way is through the mountains via SR20 up the Skagit valley, then up the Suak River to Darrington and down. That however is a drive in excess of 100 miles and along two other rivers that could be flooding!

Update: 17:20 PST: Sue has the boys, and they found literally the LAST hotel room in Arlington. I am officially stranded. SR 530 is closed at milepost 22 (pictured above) and at milepost 67 between Darrington and Rockport.

There is one possible way out, via a gravel road and a steep climb up to stilly valley’s north wall and out via Lake Cavanaugh. I have no idea of the condition of the bridge over the river on the Lake Cavanaugh road though.

Update: 19:30 PST: The larger portion of the Goolsbee family are doing well, having eaten out and now watching TV in their hotel room. ME on the other hand are sitting here alone, and am forced to deal with all the family pets… the majority of which I am allergic to. 🙁

To add uncertainty to the mix it is raining again… pretty hard.

Sixtynine point seven miles per gallon!

Above: The amazing 1.9 Liter, VW TDI engine. The thing that makes my Jetta go.

OK, so everyone knows I’m a cheapskate and make my own Diesel fuel from veggie oil. (yes Paul, I promise a diagram of the filtering setup soon!)

I also am a total lead foot and don’t drive very economically. I rarely drive the speed limit and frequently exceed it by a fair margin. I’m not an idiot, and I don’t speed where it would be dangerous to myself or others. I have only been *ticketed* for speeding twice in the past 10 years, so I must be good at avoiding speeding tickets (I have been stopped several times and warned though.) There was a blog post I saw linked off digg.com a few weeks back about avoiding speeding tickets that was partially wrong, and misleading in some aspects… perhaps I should write up a full post of my own. Anyway, this isn’t about speeding… in fact quite the contrary, it is about fuel economy. So even despite my lead foot and frequent runs at autobahn speeds, my car still averages 50 MPG. I find that amazing. It begs then how well would it do if I wasn’t such a pseudo-Schumi?

I once again drove half a tank (300 miles) in my VW Jetta TDI this past week or so, and when I topped it off tonight on my way home I was gobsmacked by the mileage I made. You see I spent the week driving verrrry carefully. This meant upshifting at 2000 RPMs on the tach, coasting down hills in neutral, coasting to stoplights and stop signs in neutral, (mostly) driving the speed limit, etc. I went 300 miles on 4.3 gallons of my veggie oil and Diesel fuel mixture. That is 69.767 miles to the gallon. That is US gallons for my overseas readers, which equals 0.832 Imperial gallons, or 3.78 liters.

69.7 MPG = 29.71 km/L

I could have managed 70 MPG if I hadn’t succumbed to temptation and NOT had a several mile long run @ 100 MPH a few nights ago. I ran an errand on Wednesday night that put me on a deserted divided highway at around 10 PM. I came off a stop light and onto the freeway doing my usual “shift @ 2000 rpm” routine, but once I realized I was alone I just kept accelerating to the mythical “ton” and rode along for several miles like that with a smile on my face. I did coast for quite a way after the ton-run to make ammends… in fact I was able to coast UP a big hill after that. 😉

My only issue with driving like this is that it is mind-numbingly boring, and lacks that je ne c’est quois… that essential Fahrvergügen I seek when behind the wheel. This is why I can never make it past half a tank! If I ran it all the way I’d die of boredom before I ran out of fuel!

So was this in some goofy anemic Hybrid filled with digital gizmos? Nope. It was in a low-tech car with an oil burning engine, albeit one running a very “green” fuel. I challenge any Hybrid or even electric car to go as far, as fast as a TDI equipped car. It just can’t be done. I could run from my home to Red Bluff, California (~700 miles) on a single tank of fuel, and do it in about 8 hours. Amazing. This car amazes me.

I feel the earth move, under my… um… butt.

I was sitting in the living room, enjoying a wee dram of Glenmorangie, when I felt the whole house wiggle. I iChatted a friend, who lives in Olympia, which is 100 miles away from here, and asked if he felt it. He said no, so I knew it could not be a very widespread one.

The image above is from a the nearest seismograph from my house in the UW network. It is located in Trafton, just off of Jim Creek road, which is as the crow flies maybe a kilometer from my home.

I have no idea where exactly on the Richter it measured, but my guess would be in the “low fours”.

The worst nurse in the world.

My wife had some minor surgery today, and it is her fate to be married to a guy that is completely lacking in the whole “nurture” gene. I mean… I can barely take care of myself, and a neon tetra in a bowl at my office – thankfully one is a cold blooded animal requiring very little care, and the other is a fish.

Somehow I managed to not kill my kids when they were babies (but let me tell you, there were a few close calls when I was left alone with them!) I am just not really cut out to care for anything… sorry. At least not anything actually alive. I’m fine with inanimate objects. A car, a computer, a network, my right leg… all will do fine under my not so watchful eye. But a human being, and especially my wife? She’s doomed.

Thankfully, she’s pretty self-sufficient and is not so bad off. She is on pain meds, and has tasked me with monitoring her medicine intake. Now THAT is something I can do… read the labels, enter the intervals into my Treo, set the alarms, etc. The key will be whether the Treo alarms will actually wake me up in the middle of the night. I sleep through everything but earthquakes greater than 5.4 on the Richter scale. For some inexplicable reason, I’ll snooze through a 5.3 and under, but once the wave or shake hits 5.4 I am bolt-upright and ready for action. Go figure. We’ll see. Hopefully she’s back to her high-functioning self again soon.

If she were to ever become incapacitated in a major way, we’d have to make polygamy legal so I could pick up a spare wife to take care of her (because I’m too cheap to actually pay somebody to be a caretaker!)

Seriously.

My son, the (potential) teenage terrorist.

My son is hoping to further his study of languages by spending a semester abroad, in either a Spanish or German-speaking country next year. In order to accomplish this we tried to renew his US passport. He had one 10 years ago, when we were in the UK, but it has long ago expired. Besides, he is about 2x the size of the photo in that passport, since he was six years old when it was taken. He’d be embarrassed to travel with that photo, so we had a new one taken. His mother took him and his photo (and birth certificate, and Social Security card, etc etc) down to the post office in Everett today (a 30 minute drive) because in order to get a new US Passoprt he must appear IN PERSON, with his parent, since he is a minor. We brought along the above photo.

The fine civil servant refused to accept the photo, and sent them away.

The reasons? The background is “too blue”… and the words on his shirt.

For those of you not aware of what turns the crank of the under-18 crowd, it is a quote from this clip. I gave him the shirt for Christmas, and I think he hasn’t taken it off since. Yep. Refused a passport due to a video game cartoon T-shirt.

When my wife enquired as to why, the outstanding, ever-vigilant civil servant hero replied: “It is all because of 9/11”

My wife replied, “None of the 9/11 hijackers had a US Passport.”

The government representative had no response to that.

So we’re going for a second try next Monday with this photo:

Ah, the magic of Photoshop!