New Q&A Up at Gingerbread Lit Mag, Seattle Snowpocalypse 2019, Snowbound (with Cats)

Snowy Back Porch View

Seattle Snowpocalypse 2019

Since I’ve last written, winter has appeared – with a vengeance – in Seattle. Last weekend it snowed five inches here – and never melted. Last night we got hit with another four inches. Grocery store shelves empty, traffic snarls, icy roads, helping cars stuck in the snow – we might not be able to leave the house for a while as no roads at ALL got plowed in my city of Woodinville. At least the cats got to enjoy it! One extra chore has been unfreezing and refilling our hummingbird feeders, as hummingbirds need extra fuel to stay warm in this cold spell.

A Q&A with Gingerbread House Literary Magazine

Thanks to Gingerbread House Literary Magazine who posted this Q&A feature on fairy tales and poetry with me today: Gingerbread House Q&A with Jeannine Hall Gailey.

Ironically they posted my poem about the White Witch last week, and then it seems the White Witch of Narnia has descended on us in Seattle to install an unending winter! Seriously, we have no temperatures above freezing on the forecast for a week and more! This is much colder (and snowier) than average for us. By late February we usually have some trees starting to bloom – not this year, it seems.

Early snowfall on my garden – now it’s covered!

Snowbound

So, with no way to escape and trapped indoors, what are my plans? Working on a Plath essay on spec, a fellowship application, and received two acceptances in the last few days (both of which, unfortunately, were stuck in my spam folder, so I didn’t even get to celebrate them right away.) I may send out one of my poetry manuscripts another couple of times, too. Still reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’s letters, and checked Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man out of the library. And although January was full of rejections, I’ve had two acceptances this week. Thinking about starting our taxes, finally. If I hadn’t already gone a little crazy from being stuck inside last week by the snow, I’m sure I’ll be a little “The Shining” by the end of this one.

Birthday and Superbowl Celebrations, pre-snow

Last weekend we celebrated my little brother and sister-in-law’s birthdays along with the Superbowl. The bad part was we fed them all our food and then were stuck on icy roads trying to restock the fridge. We haven’t had trash pickup or any delivery trucks since then, and the grocery store stocks have been raided – dairy cases empty, bread, lettuce, bananas, meat – all gone. The day we got out to Redmond, it took us an hour to get back to Woodinville – usually an eleven minute drive. Out on the road, spinouts are common, jack-knifed trucks block lanes of the highway, and Glenn had to rescue a woman in a Prius stuck in ice on the bottom of our own street, which is a mild hill! Seattle, Woodinville, and Kirkland aren’t really equipped to deal with snow – they don’t have snowplows, they don’t salt the roads, which tend towards curves and hills, even main thoroughfares remain treacherous and covered with ice in our hilly area of Woodinville/Kirkland. Many folks here (besides us midwestern transplants – I literally had my Driver’s Ed driving classes in a steep, hilly Cincinnati neighborhood, with ice and snow fog and poorly operating brakes in an old car, so besides my MS vertigo, I’m a darn good ice driver) have no experience driving in the snow. One of the days we actually got out, a Miata spun out in front of us and nearly hit us pulling out of a driveway onto a main thoroughfare and ended up blocking both lanes. So if you live in the area, be careful! The hardware stores have been sold out of snow shovels and de-icer for a week. Try to keep your hummingbirds fed (and a birdbath with water – birds are looking for water with all this ice and snow) And be sure to keep your phone charged, your car full of gas, and a shovel and kitty litter in the back of your bar (along with water and blankets) in case you get stuck. The woman who got stuck on our street said she called both AAA and the local police and both were too busy to help individuals who were stranded – there are too many stranded cars!

So, as a writer, I certainly have no excuse not to do some reading, writing, and more tedious tasks (cleaning, taxes, fellowship applications, submitting…) Wish me luck and no power outages! We are supposed to have more snow all week and wind and freezing temperatures.

PS Be extra friendly to your neighbors who may be disabled – crutches, canes, and wheelchairs all have issues on the ice, so even getting their mail may be treacherous. Be extra kind to teach other. If you have to drink some extra hot chocolate, pull out that extra blanket and book you’ve been meaning to read, make a phone call (if you have power) to someone who haven’t talked to in a while – and enjoy the quiet.