Elsewhere in America this past week — including just up the Puget Sound in Seattle and further north to Bellingham — snow was piling up to people’s second-story windows. Here in Olympia, at least in the lowlands and at sea-level, winter made a half-hearted attempt to be fierce, failed pretty thoroughly, and then sloped off to higher elevations where it could really do some mischief.
Last Friday, our regional weather-pundit, Cliff Mass, was issuing industrial-strength snowstorm alerts on KNKX. On Saturday, smelling frost in the January air, I decided to take him seriously. In one six-hour burst of energy, I battened down the hatches, prepared to ride out Snowmaggedon II. Which meant I:
- Finally cleared the last of the boxes and bins and out-of-place suitcases from the garage and was able to put the car IN the garage. A mere four months after the deadline I set, but… before the first serious snowflake could alight on the driveway.
- Restocked the log carrier under cover at the front door, and bashed down a basket of kindling with the Swedish log wizard
- Found two snow-shovels and two bins of deicer, and parked them at the front door (instead of doing what I usually do in December and leaving them buried in the garage amongst the garden spades and rakes where I found them)
- Braved the bread-and-milk-frenzied mobs at the local supermarket, returning with really useful stores: hot chocolate mix, a bottle of Monterey’s own J. Lohr Riverstone chardonnay, cat food, sweet potato fries and a half-pound of shrimp
- Also braved the Michael’s craft store, where parents dreading a week of school closures were stocking up on pipe cleaners, crayons and Play-Doh, and picked up a frame for a little craft project of my own.
I had brought back a nice array of cards and prints from my December visits to the V&A, the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the gift shop in the crypt of St. Martin in the Fields. They were such fun, I decided to make a grand Collage of Cats. The handsome letterpress tiger and the Edward Lear “Owl and the Pussy-cat” are both from Archivist Press.
My favorite might be the Matt (Pritchett) cartoon. I bought it on December 12, the day of the British election that was effectively a referendum on Brexit. It shows the man reading a paper headlined “Brexit vote” while his cat sniffs “If you insist on going out, I don’t want you nagging five minutes later to come back in.”
You can get a little insight into what The Telegraph’s cartoonists make of Brexit in this three-minute video…
And keep an eye out for the water pot Bob Moran swishes his brushes in.