Cleaning up after the storm

[petrea_mitchell]

While the rest of the country was being hit with blizzards of epic proportions, western Oregon was going through a perfectly normal weather pattern for around here, which goes like this:

1. Very cold, dry air builds up to the east and comes streaming down the Columbia Gorge, making it cold, dry, and windy.
2. Warm, moist air starts intruding from the west. Sometimes this means a little snow, but it quickly changes to freezing rain.
3. Nobody goes anywhere for a day or two because there is a layer of solid ice on everything, even vertical surfaces.
4. The rest of the warm air shows up, along with torrential rain and more winds, the ice melts all at once, localized flooding occurs.

Step 3 happened on Friday, which is garbage day in my neighborhood. With the roads still iffy Saturday morning and Sunday being Christmas, the garbage company apparently decided the heck with it and that it would just pick up twice the amount of trash at the regular time this week. Which meant that after all the loose branches lying around everywhere and the one complete tree that toppled over a couple doors away had all been cleared up, there were still trash cans sitting forlornly at the curb for days, and it's only today that we can say the storm cleanup is over.