Snow Woes

On Thursday, a friend of mine from work and I traveled to Bellevue to attend a Forensic Nursing seminar that we'd signed up for back in October.  As fans of shows like CSI and First 48, how could we resist?  The only problem was it was snowing that day.  Crazy snowing.  When I left the house at 0530, there was snow on the ground (on top of some frost from the previous week's snow) and thunder and lightning lighting the skies.  I've never seen that before.  I picked up Joanne near Lakewood and drove her Nissan Pathfinder to the seminar.  The roads were clear until Bellevue, and by the time we hit I-405 it was like BAM!, white snow everywhere and traffic came to a 2 mph crawl.  People were spinning out, pulling off to the side of the road, and putting on chains.  It eventually became a four-hour trip to Bellevue, and we were 1.5 hours late for the seminar.

The seminar itself was about 8 hours long and pretty interesting.  The speaker was Paul Clements, Ph.D., APRN, BC, DF-IAFNP.  (I don't remember what most of those titles mean, but he had a doctorate in psych nursing, helped out with profiling in criminal cases, and did a lot of work with the Virginia Tech shootings.)  The seminar was very interesting to me.  He talked about how to properly document physical abuse/trauma, child molesters, gangs (and teased that I was the "resident gang expert"), and the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths.  Joanne decided she was the sociopath and that I was the more dangerous psychopath since I knew a lot of weird, morbid stuff.  Perhaps we're a little of both -- the other night on our lunch break, we watched an autopsy on TV.

The snow kept coming off and on during the seminar until it ended at 3:30 pm.  The snow was probably up to 6 inches by my estimation, but we tried to make it home instead of staying in Bellevue and getting a hotel (as both of our parents suggested) because we didn't want it to freeze over and then have to deal with driving on ice.  We made it okay all the way to 167 and were promptly stopped by a sea of parked cars.  We'd move about 50 feet, wait for 15 minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.  Eventually we were trapped on 167 until 11 pm.  That's right, we spent almost 7 hours getting home, most of it muttering and cursing under our breath at why everything surrounding 167 (512, 410) was closed.  I even called KOMO AM 1000 to vent my frustration, but of course when I was on the air the sanding trucks and snow plows finally came, so I didn't come off as frustrated as I wanted.

I ended up spending the night at Joanne's place since the radio said I-5 and the 16 were all "treacherous", icy, and cars were having a hard time staying on the road.  It was already dark and since I drive a Barbie car Toyota Echo, I didn't want to chance it.  We went to Wal-Mart the next day to pick up a pair of scrubs and other essentials for me so I could go to work that night, so I now own my very first pair of holiday scrubs -- Frosty the Snowman, but I was neither a jolly nor happy soul wearing them.

Fast forward to now, where it is snowing again, and the news says we are supposed to get another 8-13 inches of snow.  We were planning on going to Poulsbo to see Guy's family and Megan, but I don't know if we can make it there safely.  Grr.