Let's review my week so far, shall we?
Okay, so Monday morning I woke up to find my shower inoperable. That is, I could not pull out the knob that turns the water on without great effort (and fear of breaking the thing), and even then no water gushed forth as one would expect. No doubt about it, the pipes were frozen. Fortunately, the sinks and toilet still worked, so I was not worried and immediately hurried to my first day of class.

My classes are going to be interesting this quarter. In "Programming Languages" I will learn all about ML, Scheme, Squeek? and several other languages you only ever vaguely hear about. But no LISP! Previous takers of this class spent almost half the quarter on LISP. I'm disappointed.

I did look up the best method to defrost frozen plumbing on the internet (incidentally, "frozen pipes" is a better search phrase than "frozen plumbing" for this). The most popular method is to apply heat via hair dryer. Some people suggest using a torch because it's fast, others suggest not using a torch because it is dangerous and you have to water to put out a fire (that's why you're using it -- ironic, eh?). Fortunately, when I got home, turning on the water brought forth a tiny trickle of water, followed by some hacking and coughing, then a full stream of water. Monday day was not as cold as yesterday. The management for my apartment also stuffed big orange fliers in everyone's doorway explaining that 2-6 inches of snow were expected the next day and that we should all run a trickle of hot water through our faucets to keep them from freezing. Since they pay the water bill, I had no problem complying.

Moving on to Tuesday, yesterday, I woke up to a winter wonder land with snow still falling. (When it snows in Seattle, it snows at night. It does not keep snowing during the day; this is just not right.) Arrived at school, found school closed, waited 1 hour for bus that runs every 15 minutes, and finally got home 5 hours after I left, having accomplished only purchasing most (but not all) of my textbooks.

And finally today, Wednesday. What did I find when I woke up this morning? No power. Again. This time I had a nice battery powered clock ticking away, so at least I knew what time it was. I didn't trust the freshness of the batteries, though, so I still called the telephone number that gives you the time. (The telephone service almost never goes out with the power for me. It must be buried, redundant, or something.) It was correct.

So I left for school the same time I always do: 8:00. That gets me to school just in time for my 9:30 class. Except that today the bus was something like 20 minutes late, traffic was terrible, we had to reroute to avoid some nasty snow-covered hills, and did I mention we had freezing rain last night so all the tree-limbs were covered in ice and falling down everywhere? Long story short, I arrived at 10:30, just in time to completely miss the entirety of my first class, with an hour to go before my next one. Fortunately, lecture notes are online. :)

My feet are cold and wet and I'm going to be here until 9:00 PM. Good think I brought extra socks; I'll have to be careful when I use them, though.