I believe that today’s tunage matches, nearly perfectly, my drive home in the ice early Tuesday morning. From the swift exit of my workplace, to the sudden halt when I entered the “40 blocks in two hours” grind through the southwestern burbs of Seattle, including the skidding, the sliding, the emergency vehicles, the sudden release into freemoving traffic and my eventual pulling into my driveway after taking over three hours to go just 25 miles.
Skippy’s First Samba Lesson – Clifford Gilberto Rhythm Combination
I know I’ve featured at least one track from Clifford here on the Soundboard before, to mixed reviews. The CGRC plays what is most popularly known as Acid Jazz, and is not the most easily digestible for folks who can only enjoy music with properstructure.
But I do encourage you all to take a listen. If you like it, I suggest you pick up the album it came from “I Was Young And Needed The Money” (which is what I tell folks why I started blogging. It makes most just tilt their head like a dog when I tell them that).
If you really like it, I suggest you also pick up the “Deliver the Weird” EP.
And now to the pictures.
Before I left for work last night, I posted about the upcoming funky weather conditions: Snow, then freezing rain. For once, the local weather-guessers were pretty much right on the money. The snow came down for like five minutes, and then the freezing rain arrived.
While I didn’t get anything dramatic in the way of pics last night, I did chronicle the change in weather from the parking lot of my workplace.
That white stuff on the ground is not snow, it is the accumulation of around 15-20 minutes of freezing rain.
Here is an inch of it an hour after the first pic.
Imagine dumping a slurpy or a snowcone onto a flat surface, and that is what freezing rain is. While it is constantly melting, the water has no where to go to find it’s lowest point, so it just stays under the ice. When you try to drive on it, you basically are hydroplaning on solids with compact ice from the two days before underneath it.
Studded tires don’t work too horribly well on it, yet chains are unnecessary. So you basically just go slow and be prepared to react quickly.
My commute home this morning was considerably less than the 3+ hours it took me on Tuesday morning, at only 45 minutes (usual travel time is 30 minutes).
After I got two-thirds of the way home, it was like someone took a Paul Bunyan sized broom and swept the south end of King County clean of snow, with everything falling from the sky being actual, normal water drops.
Speaking of my commute home, here is a pic of my commuter vehicle after having freezing rain fall on it for thirty minutes.
Old Faithful Goldfinger (aka: Rocinante)