I joked the other day about us being snow wimps here in the Pacific Northwest.
But really, we're not.
It's just that we don't have any of the snow-readiness that any of the more snowily-disposed climes have. Y'know, snow tires, snowplows, snow blowers, ice melt - all the paraphernalia of "Gosh, it snowed - let's get on with it and get back to work/school". When you seem to only get an inch or two at a time every few years, you just don't need to have a lot of those things around. This is one of the rare exception years that reminds us what snow is really like.
Winter showed up all over a sudden in February. We got a storm about a week ago and had to close for a day. No problem, just a blip. Except it took Fedex, whose hub in Tacoma was severely affected, the rest of the week to catch up, which resulted in us missing some products we really needed.
Then, Friday night into Saturday, we got dumped on. Then the temps went into the teens (or single digits in a couple of our microclimates). The plows have been gradually working their way through even since. I was finally able to make it safely down our hill late this morning and I dropped by the office today...
...where I was happy to see the office parking lot being plowed:
Now (Sunday late afternoon) it's snowing again, and expected to drop into the low twenties again, so everything that melted in our two hours of sunshine will be snow-coated ice in the morning, so schools made an early decision to close tomorrow.
But Monday night they're predicting 5 to 10 inches and potential for freezing rain.
Oh, boy.
Our local Seattle station is making the very sensible suggestion that people hunker down till Wednesday - rather than endure yet another mess of abandoned vehicles come commute time.
Meantime, over here on the Peninsula where we tend to get colder temps and more snow than Seattle, I'm thinking of what our hunkering down means for all those orders that are supposed to ship Monday... and Tuesday...
And I'm thinking of all the deliveries we're expecting tomorrow... and the rest of the week... and wondering how the freight companies and post office will be coping. Sigh.
So I feel like I want to just put up one great big blanket "I'm Sorry!" across the whole store, because we're going to be disappointing a lot of people with our timing this week! All I can say is, we'll do our best. Between staff safety and the freight companies' constraints, the chances are, we won't be doing any outbound shipping over the next couple of days, with the exception of items that normally get shipped direct from the manufacturer (e.g. Purilens, and Eye Eco goggles). But we'll be doing everything we can from home and ready to answer any questions or help with anything else that we can.
I sure appreciate everyone's patience. We hate it when these things happen. Even had a customer whose package (shipping from a supplier back east) was affected by BOTH the polar vortex AND our first winter storm, which came almost week ago. Ugh!
On the other hand... some people (ahem, Drama) actually seem to ENJOY the snow:
And here's the serene view from Brent's place:
My Icelandic sheep of course take it all in stride... nothing like having snow in your genes.
