Ordinary Day

Hey all,

I haven't been actively blogging for a while as you all know, but what you may not know is that a contributing factor to this is that the web server solarbird and I use to host our Wordpress sites has been periodically crashing. And it's driving me friggin' spare, because I do not know WHY.

So until I figure this out, I wanted to spread the word that if you need information on my writing, please use my backup site at angelahighland.info.

Which you may also need to do in the next week or so anyway. Starting tonight we have incoming cold and snow in the Seattle area. Tonight's event is not supposed to generate a lot of snow, but there's potential for a bigger event mid-week. Chances of power and/or Internet outages are good.

Which is why I have put a detailed call for help about the web server problems over here on the angelahighland.info site. If you're a Debian guru, and/or have encountered a bug similar to ours, can you advise me?

I'm looking ideally for a solution to the problem, but would be happy as well with guidance on how to actually track down what's causing it. In particular, I do not have experience with using gdb as a debugging tool, so pointers on that would be most welcome.

(Feel free to comment here, or over on the angelahighland.info post!)

The big story in Seattle yesterday was the rollover of a butane tanker, which hit four cars and caused a 7-hour shutdown of I-5. Area natives and long-time residents know: if I-5 gets shut down, traffic around here is completely fucked. And that’s exactly what happened. The Washington State DOT started warning mid-afternoon that drivers should avoid downtown Seattle if at all possible, which of course meant that all the drivers who couldn’t get on the highway were clogging up the side streets.

And a lot of folks were stuck on the highway for multiple hours, too. Long enough that an enterprising taco truck opened for business, which I think is my favorite part of the entire story. ;D

Complicating the matter was that we also got hit with some freakish weather: a brief snowstorm that rolled in just after 3pm. We’re talking thundersnow here, people. There’s even video (see the link) of lightning striking the Space Needle.

Remembering my epic saga of the Worst Commute Ever, which I VERY MUCH DID NOT WANT TO DO AGAIN, I bailed on work around a quarter after 3 and headed home. I hung out at the bus stop at Elliott and Western for about five or ten minutes, thinking that I’d catch a bus to the bus tunnels–and see then whether I should a) try to catch one of my usual busses, a 522 or a 312, or b) get on the light rail to get to the U-district instead.

When I got to the bus stop was about when the thundersnow hit. And while I was waiting, chatting with a couple other folks, we all were VERY startled by thunder and lightning interspersed with the increasingly vigorous mix of snow and ice pellets coming down. Icy slush started building up very quickly on the road.

My phone’s OneBusAway app claimed that the next busses were due in a couple of minutes. The app was mistaken. Elliott very quickly turned into a parking long, with a long line of vehicles in the southbound lanes stretching well past Big Fish and the buildings beyond. It became very obvious very quickly that busses were NOT going to reach us in a timely fashion.

So while I wasn’t exactly happy about walking in these conditions, I punted to plan B: hoofing it to the bus tunnels. (I had flirted with the idea of catching a 32 to the U district instead, but given the condition the roads were in, that seemed ill-advised. Also much slower, given that the 32 takes a meandering path through Fremont before it finally reaches the U-district.) Fortunately I had on my Yaktrax, so walking wasn’t really a problem. And I had on my scarf to protect my face, and a heat pack in my pocket. I had my work laptop in the backpack, which meant a heavier than usual load to carry, but eh, could have been worse.

On my way up Denny I passed a #2 bus which was having a very hard time with the slush, and which got stuck for multiple minutes as I watched it. It wasn’t the only bus I saw without snow chains, either. All along 3rd, I saw a long line of busses trying to head north–very slowly. Lots of cars on that street and all the intersecting ones, too. I was frankly stunned that nobody actually ran into anybody else, given how slushy the roads were.

I made it to the bus tunnels just in time to miss an outbound train. (Also, walking through the bus tunnels while wearing Yaktrax? Kinda hard. But I didn’t really want to take them off, given that I wasn’t sure what kind of conditions I’d find on the way home.)

The next train was very crowded, and the driver even told folks trying to get on that he had two more trains queued up behind him. But by then I was already on board and wasn’t about to go anywhere. And really, once I made it onto the train, I was fine. Downtown->U-district by light rail is very fast, only two stops. And once I got off at the U-district station, I found that the thundersnow had not impacted the roads there at all. I walked over to Campus Parkway, and got to the bus stop there pretty much exactly as a 372 was pulling up. SCORE.

I pinged Dara to ask her to pick me up at the bottom of our hill, since our neighborhood roads were also clear, and walking with Yaktrax on and a heavier than usual backpack was tiring and I didn’t want to go up our hill. And the 372 zipped along at a nice steady typical pace, so all in all, it only took me a little longer than usual to get home. I was home well before 6pm.

Other folks–not so much. When I got into work this morning, several coworkers were commiserating on our Slack channels about how long it took them to get home. A couple folks said it took them over four hours. And given that I-5 was closed until around 7pm, Metro and Sound Transit were still absolutely impacted–I saw a tweet that indicated a bunch of busses that normally traveled along I-5 were running over 90 minutes late. So yeah, if I’d had to take the usual 522 or 312, my commute home would have taken a lot longer.

The moral of this story: ALL HAIL LIGHT RAIL.

Any Seattle-area locals want to chime in on how well the commute did or did not treat you?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Those of you who follow me on social media, or who saw the posts that went up on angelahighland.wordpress.com, LJ, and Dreamwidth last night, know we lost power around 2:30 yesterday afternoon. We were down all evening, but at least as of right now, we’re back.

Yesterday evening, we amused ourselves with playing around with instruments and with listening to one of the Big Finish audio adventures off my phone, piped through a Bluetooth speaker. The Cloisters of Terror turned out to be a delightful thing to listen to during a power outage! In no small part because Mr. Baker was in fine form in that story.

Here are the sorts of conversations we have in our house when the power is out!

Dara (while trying to figure out the chord progression for a song): OMG this chart doesn’t HAVE an A flat! They just skipped it!

Me (nodding sagely): ‘What damn fool would want to play an A flat chord on a bouzouki?’

And also:

Me: Okay good chiro has power. So I will go out tomorrow and bring back any necessary things. Be thinking about necessary things I can bring back.

Dara: Electricity! 4 buckets of electricity!

Paul: I think the fridge is going to need more than 4 buckets.

Dara: Okay, 6 buckets! Go to Costco.

George, bless his little kitty heart, kept wandering around mewing in a sort of “EVERYTHING IS DARK AND WEIRD AND QUIET WHY IS IT LIKE THIS AND WHY ARE YOU ALL IN THIS OTHER ROOM OH HEY THE FIRE IS ON YAY WARM”. And once we settled in to listen to the audio, George curled up in front of the fireplace to go zzzzzzzz.

I went to bed around 10:30ish and woke up just before 1am when the noise of the neighbors’ generators shut up. I sleepily realized the clock was blinking, checked the time on the phone (which I was keeping by our bed), and noted 12:54. So our power must have come back just a few minutes before that, long enough for neighbors to go YAY and turn their generators off.

Dara brought the servers back up this morning, and I scampered out to go to chiro and Safeway and the booze store (so that I could replenish the cake vodka and Baileys supply, and OH BY THE WAY YOU GUYS, I did find another bottle of Pumpkin Spice Baileys, which is an actual thing that exists and you should try it if those are words that sound like fun to you). Dara is heading out now that I’m home again, as the Norwescon concom has a meeting today, and they kinda can’t cancel it, because it’s at the hotel and they’re contractually obligated to use the rooms when they’re booked for. But she’s going to scamper back here ASAP when the meeting is done.

As of this writing Seattle City Light has a mere 11 customers out. Puget Sound Energy has 5,125 down still. And I gotta say, cranky as I am that PSE has been so random in our power service this year, their crews were out last night working their asses off. And that we got power back in the dead of night means their crews were out there in the wet dark, working for us. So kudos to them for that.

The current High Wind Warning is supposed to kick in at 3pm this afternoon and run until 2am, with the peak winds now expected between 5pm and 10pm. Cliff Mass has his current forecast up here, and from what he’s saying, the storm is still aiming for north of us, but we’ll be on the very edge of it. Seattle proper may dodge a bullet, but chances are high that Kenmore will get hit harder. And even if damaging winds don’t smack us, chances are VERY high we will lose power again, possibly for days. Expect that angelahighland.com will go down again, in which case I will continue to post updates on angelahighland.wordpress.com as well.

And given that the wind conditions yesterday still caused quite a lot of damage (note the gallery of pics on the Seattle Times’ updates here, PARTICULARLY the snapped power pole), I’m still expecting things to be very, very messy tonight and into tomorrow.

Brace for impact, Cascadians. Charge all your devices. Do your laundry while you still have power. Songda is COMING.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

This weekend’s storm action has begun.

Amazingly, our house made it through last night’s windstorm action without losing power for more than a couple of minutes at a time. We did have several tiny power hits, and we’re continuing to have them this morning, but so far our power is holding. And every time I see our power flicker, I go into Han Solo mode.

Not so much for a lot of other local folks; as of this writing, over 11,000 people are showing as out on the PSE Outage Map. This number has been fluctuating mightily over the last couple of hours, but it’s not dropped below 6,000 as of when I got up.

Reports have been that the morning commute has been wretched as well. There has been water on the roadways, a lot of collisions, and for a little while even, the SB express lanes on I-5 were shut down. Between that and the word that Hillary Clinton is here for a private fundraising event downtown, which has the potential to pooch the evening commute up RIGHT good, I NOPED right out of trying to commute today and am currently trying to work from home.

Local news reports have downgraded expectations for tomorrow’s storm from “comparable to the Columbus Day storm in 1962” to “comparable to the storm we had in December 2006”. KOMO’s report on that is here. And Cliff Mass put up a post yesterday with an updated forecast here.

From what these reports were saying, we had conflicting models in play as to where the remnants of Typhoon Songda were going to hit. And now these models appear to have split the difference, which means we’re going to have a mess on our hands tomorrow. Not as severe a mess as earlier worries indicated, but still a mess.

I was here for the 2006 storm and that’s the one that had a lot of local people without power for 9-10 days, even on our hill. We were only down for about two and a half days but that’s still a lot. Here are my LJ posts from that month:

Batten down the hatches

Hardcore power flickers at the Murkworks

9:45pm, mark

Murkworks update

And we’re up

Electricity, it’s good to have you back!

Storm debris pictures

So yeah. That storm was a mess. And if tomorrow’s action is going to be similar, we’re in for some fun times. It’s supposed to get windier later today, too, and it’s windy in Kenmore right now.

Let’s see how long we stay up and if I manage to get today’s dayjob tasks done. Place your bets!

And everybody stay safe and dry out there!

Editing to add: Holy crap, Seattle City Light’s got nearly 20,000 out right now. Puget Sound Energy’s got over 16,000. And this is the warmup act for tomorrow. There are outages just north of the Big Fish office, too, so this will be me being a little happy I NOPED right out of trying to commute. Coworkers on our Slack system are reporting flickering lights in the office.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Heads up to anyone who didn’t already see me post this on social media this afternoon: we have a windstorm forecast for tomorrow, and there’s already a High Wind Warning up with some details. We’re talking potential gusts up to 70mph in late afternoon and early evening.

And y’all know what this means: probable power outage at the Murkworks. Which will in turn impact the availability of my angelahighland.com and annathepiper.org sites, Dara’s crimeandtheforcesofevil.com, and all other websites, mailing lists, and other resources that we host. So please be advised that chances are VERY high that we’ll lose power some time tomorrow.

Dara and I will post the usual alerts if this happens. Apologies in advance for anyone who might try to visit my site over the next 24-48 hours, if I do indeed go down!

(And apologies for anyone who tries to come by this afternoon when I was also down. We lost power TODAY too, but that was apparently due to downed trees that took out power in Kenmore for about 1,200 customers. Trees that were, I suspect, weakened by this past Wednesday night’s storm. Ah, the joys of living in the PNW in March!)

If you’re local, I recommend battening down all the hatches, and stocking up on ice for your coolers and batteries for your flashlights. Tomorrow could get tricky.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

We actually regained power overnight, but we didn’t get the servers back up and running until we got up this morning. However, we ARE now back up and running!

And Dara even took the opportunity to upgrade the network card in our webserver, so now hopefully our websites will be much more zippy for all you lovely visitors who come by to say hi. Let us know if you see any problems, won’t you?

Hope everybody made it through the windy action okay! And all hail the power company crews who’ve been working for the last several hours to get power back on for us all!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Heads up, you guys, we have a Wind Event coming in.

The PI is reporting about the incoming wind fun tomorrow night, so here’s the obligatory MURKWORKS.NET MAY GO OFFLINE TOMORROW NIGHT advisory. Dara and I will post if our servers have to go down.

ALSO: the PI’s saying one of our local meteorologists is advising people to go home early if possible. And the current High Wind Watch is talking about the winds hitting us possibly during tomorrow night’s commute. Batten down the hatches, this could get messy.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

So there I was taking a nap yesterday afternoon before we all scampered off to see Skyfall, when I jolted awake hearing solarbird charge down the stairs yelling “LOOK OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!”

Groggily, I did so, and perked up when I saw a rainbow out the library window! Which was lovely and all–except Dara was way more excited than a single rainbow warranted. And I heard her yelling about three of them. So I shook myself awake, stepped out onto the porch, and saw THIS.

That’s Some Pot of Gold

I had never seen a rainbow skewing off at an angle like that–double rainbows, sure, but never a triple configuration like that! So I grabbed the iPad and snapped a whole bunch of pics. This was one of my better ones. Dara, being way better at taking pictures than I am, got even better ones which she posted here and here (Dreamwidth), or if you want the LJ mirrors of the posts, they’re here and here!

Dara reported that Facebook had theorized that the third rainbow was caused by reflecting off of Lake Washington, a theory supported when Cliff Mass, our local weather guru, posted about it here! One of his readers sent in a pic of the rainbows from a different viewpoint, too, so that pic’s flipped around!

So very, very cool. It’s wacky fun like this that recharges my ability to deal with Seattle’s rainy falls and winters. And I swear this is going into a book at some point, because it was a sight full of magic.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Most of you out there probably are aware already, but just in case you aren’t, be advised that we have serious snow on the way here. Therefore, as is often the case when we have wacky fun weathertimes, connectivity to Murkworks.net and resources we house may be impacted. Our power may go out, or even if we stay up, connectivity via Comcast may be affected if there are any issues with ice on power or phone lines.

Assume therefore that if you can’t reach any commonly accessed Murkworks.net resources, this will be why. This will include the Murkworks MUSH, WordPress sites and other web pages, mailing lists, user logins, and mail.

Follow Cliff Mass’ blog for ongoing weather developments if you’re interested. His last two posts on the situation are here and here. The Times has an article up here.

If we do go down and you need to reach me, you can do so via my gmail addresses, annathepiper or angela.korrati.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter saw me live-tweeting this last night, but for those of you who follow me from the blog or LJ or DW, here’s the epic saga of Anna’s Worst Commute Ever!

My previous commute record was set back in 2006, roughly three and a half hours between solarbird calling me and my finally making home to MurkNorth. This beat that. Hands down.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.