This is Freaking Nuts!

It's the most unusual weather for the western part of Washington State that many can recall. Ordinarily we have two or three times a year some snow for a day or so and then it warms up and it's all gone. Right now it is snowing again, and I just measured a 10" depth in my front yard.

And that's after it warmed up -- slightly -- yesterday and we had some freezing rain, which tended to tamp down the surface. Then it froze overnight, which left an interesting thin crust on the top of the snow.

But the bright side of that is that the peanuts that I throw out for the native scrub jays, Steller's jays and my two crows (Cheryl and Russell) tended to skid across the surface instead of dropping out of sight into a drift, so it was much easier for them to scoop them up. That said, it was still kind of funny seeing the scrub jays -- who are the bravest and will come the closest to me, even to the point of taking the peanuts out of my hand -- with crusts of ice on their beaks from digging out the sunken peanuts.

Luckily I have a Jeep Wrangler with four-wheel drive and good snow tires, so getting around hasn't been much of a problem, except for avoiding the idiots who don't have the first clue about driving in snow and ice conditions. And we seem to have a lot of them here.

We're just not used to this kind of thing here in the Wet Corner, and the weather report says it might continue for several more days.