Another Awesome Seattle Weekend

Matthew Seattle

 

You know how, in science-fiction movies, every world has a single, defining characteristic? It’s always, like, The Desert Planet or The Ice Planet or The Swamp Planet or The Lava Planet?

I have apparently been marooned on The Planet Of Perpetually Shitty Weather, populated by a race of pale, damp creatures who subsist exclusively on coffee, and spend their days fretting about the standing water in their crawl spaces.

43 thoughts to “Another Awesome Seattle Weekend”

  1. That planet bred grunge music, so it can’t be all bad.

    Course, it also bred Starbucks too, so what do I know.

  2. Per Ray Bradbury, we Seattlites are evidently on Venus, as in “All Summer in a Day,” and “The Long Rain.” The latter story begins:

    The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shoved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

    Also, what exactly does “Rain becoming Showery” mean?

  3. Oh man, I remember “All Summer in a Day”. That was such a sad story. No wonder it resonanted with me (I live in Vancouver, BC).

  4. Only in Seattle would you see a forecast with six different ways to say “Rain” in it.

    I love this city, coffee addictions and all.

  5. The song isn’t true? “They’ve got the bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle”

    BTW, it’s just as lovely in Olympia.

  6. Meteorology is easy in Seattle. Ask “Can you see the mountains?” If the answer is yes, it will be sunny. If the answer is no, it will be raining.

  7. You know those guys who take weird pride in their ability to drink heavily? Like because they have an obvious substance abuse problem wherein they can absorb a stupid amount of booze and remaining standing, that you should somehow be impressed and respect them more? That’s how I, as a native Puget Sounder, have always been about rain. Like all these wussoids from out of town buckle and complain about the rain but I can stay up all night, pounding back shot after shot of the stuff and still whup you in pool and start a fistfight in the parking lot.
    Well, this holiday season has gotten to me. I’ve finally passed out on the meteorological barroom floor, in a puddle of my own rainy sick.
    Yes. I have a problem.

  8. Seattle-speak… they are like Eskimos (who have 14 million differents ways to say, “snow”), except in Seattle speak, it’s about the rain. And the drizzle. And the big drops. And the … you get the picture.

    And I particularly like “showery.” That’s delightful.

  9. I live in Vancouver, too, so I’m getting the exact same weather as you, except it’s two degrees chillier. You wouldn’t think it makes a difference, but it does.

  10. Planet Seattle also includes Planet Britain, which has a very similar climate (indeed my hometown, Cardiff, has marginally more annual rainfall). We also make the weather comprise one third of all our conversations with strangers.

  11. Maybe you could share a little rain with Texas? It hasn’t rained here in Dallas since like, October. I’m starting to miss rain, which is probably a bad sign. Plus, it’s January and the highs are in the 70s. Clearly Texas is going to end up as The Desert Planet within a few years (if it doesn’t burn up first).

  12. I love it when staunch Seattle-defenders point out that Miami has great annual rainfall than Seattle. Yes, but we’re not sipping Mai Tais under a palm tree while waiting for the afternoon squall to blow through, dammit!

  13. I heard a beautiful forecast in London once – “afternoon sunshine, resulting in thundershowers”. Some places you just can’t win. This includes Planet Norddeutschland – Regen, Niesel, Platzregen, Schneeregen, Dauerregen…

  14. Keep up the good work. Maybe it will keep people from moving to Seattle.

    Rain vs showers is the size of the drops. You must not be a native.

    Althoug Miami may have the same amount of rain, it isn’t as constant as in Seattle. I really is a rare day without any rain.

    I disagree…The blue of the sky when you can see it in Seattle is unbelievable. A non-rainy day in Seattle is pure heaven.

  17. The first 20 something years I lived in the PNW the rain never bothered me. I moved to MN and the snow drove me nuts so I moved back. I could only handle 2 years of the perpetual darkness and liquid depression that fell from the skies and that was it. Back to MN with me! I could stand living on the set of “Erik the Viking” no more! Buck up, you have greener trees than the rest of us!

  18. You know what they say about Seattle — if you don’t like the weather, wait five months. (and yes, it’s been getting me down lately, too.)

  19. Sort of a pet peeve: I’ve never understood complaints about Seattle weather. Do you people have any idea how much worse it is almost everywhere else in the US? Take a look at New York or Chicago’s five-month forecast. It can usually be paraphrased, “Wear several layers of clothing and use caution not to lock yourself out of your home or vehicle after sundown. Otherwise, there will be a forty percent chance of DEATH.”

    The best response to Seattle’s winter weather is to ignore it. Go do whatever you’d do on a 70-degree summer day.

  20. Yes, it rains all of the time in Seattle. It’s horrible. Rain rain rain. It never stops. The entire population is wet, moldy, pasty white, wears flannel, and lives on caffeine. We never see the sun. It’s only a nasty rumor that we have mountains. The only reason we know we’re close to the sea is because of the howling gales that constantly rip through. The papers run articles weekly about people getting carted off to the insane asylums, driven mad by the constant downpours. Especially out-of-towners. No-one should ever ever move here.

    (Well, we’ve got to do SOMETHING to try to bring some sanity to this housing market. $200K for a studio condo? Get real!)

  22. did you wake up in time to see the flash of sun this morning, somewhere around 10 am? before we could rally ourselves to get outside for a dose of vitamin d ….it was gone.

  23. I literally have your page bookmarked in my tab stack immediately after the NWS. The two pages had the weather boxes at the same height. I thought Safari had crashed horribly. And then I scrolled down.

  25. I was in Seattle for the last two weeks of 2005: not only did it rain, but it actually rained hard at times, which I can’t recall it doing before. Of course, everyone was overjoyed, since it was snowing in the mountains and they could go skiing.

  27. I’ve lived near Seattle all my life, and kind of like the rain. Everyone at work thinks I’m a little nuts though.
    I once heard that the Seattle area sells more sunglasses than any other city in the US. I postulate that this is because we lose them in between bouts of sunshine and have to constantly buy new pairs. That and we’re always caught outside off guard and unprepared when the sun comes out. It actually causes traffic accidents.

  28. I can’t understand why you are complaining about a 100% accurate weather forecast, just print it out and keep it with you. A little reminiscent of Peter Sellers & Spike Milligan in the Goons script (can be found on http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/what_time_is_it.html), “What time is it, Eccles?”, but without the timing.

    By the way, anyone from the UK living in Wales complaining about rain has missed the point – there would be no reason to have Wales if it didn’t catch the rain for the rest of us.

  29. I’m English, and therefore regard myself as an expert on rain. I live in Carlisle, in England’s very own PNW, so we get a lot of it here. But a cousin of mine moved from London to San Francisco about 25 years ago, and after a couple of years claimed to be crawling up the wall with frustration that each and every day was warm, dry and sunny. No texture to the weather, you see: without the bad days you can’t fully appreciate the good.

    Mind you, she’s still there, so it can’t be that bad.

  30. Weather is the UK is probably what bred a race of hairy, maniac Celts who were determined to fight everyone and anyone. Winter weather England is enough to make any ancient people stand and bare their asses from the white cliffs of Dover to challenge Europe to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”

  31. I wasn’t complaining about the weather in Wales, I like rain, well, the right sort of rain that is. In any case, it’s drier than my hometown in Devon. I used to work in an office with someone from LA, they were most tickled with our mini-meterological reports upon returning from our lunch break, I think “it’s trying to rain out there” amused her the most.

  32. It’s bright and sunny in San Francisco with not a cloud in the sky and a slight nip to the air. Perfect beach bonfire weather.

    Of course, that’s why studio apartments here are $600K. That’s also why all of us are moving to Seattle. Now, I mean. We’re actually in the car.

  33. Just outside of Seattle here. I LOVE the rain! I heard someone mention umbrellas. We don’t need no stinking umbrellas. I’m to the point where, we go three days straight with no rain, I start looking to the sky with a worried look on my face.

  34. “I have apparently been marooned on The Planet Of Perpetually Shitty Weather, populated by a race of pale, damp creatures who subsist exclusively on coffee, and spend their days fretting about the standing water in their crawl spaces.”

    Do you have any English heritage?

  35. You’re not imaginining it. Apparently Seattle is about to set a record, according to The Associated Press:

    “SEATTLE (AP)

  36. At the age of 27, I moved to Berkeley, CA. Been here for over 20 years. The whining and the tearing of hair and the gnashing of teeth when there’s even the slightest break in the sunshine is a wonder to behold. People down here just don’t get it that there’s a cool denouement – After months of drizzle and showers and mist and “it’s been raining for 24 hours straight”, the wonder of that first day in April when the temp cracks 62 degrees makes EVERYONE happy – You can go about for several days, and everyone smiles.

  37. Man, you weren’t kidding. I just saw the Today Show report about Seattle’s weather. Hope everything stays safe where you live.

  38. I was actually IN Seattle this week (I typically read from afar), and you know, I don’t really mind it too much. But then, I’m 1/2 Irish & 1/2 Hungarian, so my people pretty much come from crappy climates. It suits me.

  42. If it’s your first year there, the payoff is Spring and Summer. A little further north, like Bellingham, it gets gee-oooor-geous. In the meantime, get an Ottlight… and don’t use your umbrella. That’ll just make you look like a wuss or a tourist.

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