Dead Letter Department #84

weather report

Snow was predicted. I have a weather guy—he’s not my personal guy, just someone who posts on local forums about his weather predictions, which are somehow more accurate than what my phone tells me 99% of the time. While my phone app was still telling us we’d only get a couple inches of snow, he was saying there’d be 4”-8” in Bellingham proper, and that the lowlands, up near the mountains, would get closer to 10.

Instead, the whole county got hammered—we ended up with close to 11 inches in my backyard, and this is in an area where a single sopping inch can shut things down almost completely. Buses stopped running, all the college campuses and city services were shut down, and school was cancelled, which I knew from the enthused hooting next door when the neighbors released their kids out into the snow to play. At one point I stood outside and watched the flakes come down in plump little bunches all clinging together, covering everything faster than the eye could keep up with.

I put the new snow shovel into heavy rotation, breaking it up into different sections, since my back does not exactly delight in that particular activity any more, and did my best to keep a pathway to the mailbox clear and one car mostly dug out.

It was beautiful, looking out, but eerily silent, except for the occasional grinding rattle of the snowplow moving along the main road. None of my neighbors seemed to go out, except to scrape their own yard’s paths, and when I glimpsed the busier street down the way, I could see only the occasional enormous SUV pushing through the snow, usually with a precariously balanced cap of snow perched on top that they’d neglected to remove.

I’d been fortunate enough to plan for it, stocking up on the couple of things I thought I might need earlier in the week, & with no commute it really shouldn’t have been that affecting, but for a few days it felt as though I was completely cut off from the world, inside a quiet snow globe, with no way out. A layer of ice added to the hazard, making everything slick and smooth, and when I broke off a chunk of snowpack to look at it, there was a gleaming, hard layer laying over it.

Even the melt started slowly, dimpling the blanket of snow into divots, making it look like an enormous eiderdown quilt pulled up over the earth, and by yesterday, when the thaw had really begun, water was running off the roof in such quantities that it sounded like a heavy rainfall, even though the sky was high and grey, clouds hanging onto their moisture.

When I woke up this morning & looked out in the blueish predawn light, it took me a second to see what was different: roofs visible, grey and green metal, wet looking solar panels, bare branches when before everything had been wrapped in white.

reading room

I devoured the latest Murderbot, System Collapse, in two days, sniffling through big chunks of it at the prospect of our beloved Murderbot tangling with its own unwanted emotions, doing its best to figure out how to exist in a world that only wanted to use it up. I thought I’d be able to space the reading out a little more, stay in that world longer, maybe drink in some of the details, but it turns out when Martha Wells hands me another installment in what has easily become one of my favorite stories, all I can do is shove it into my eyeballs as quickly as I know how, & then maybe flip to the beginning and start again. I have been trying to save that, the full re-read, for sometime when I really need it.

There was an announcement of a TV show deal, with Alexander Skarsgard playing Murderbot. He’s a wonderful actor, & I sincerely hope it does well—I hope I get to love it, & think it’s great—but I also have a little bit of the dread that comes when something you’ve cast & peopled in your own personal brain space based on words takes another form. He won’t be the Murderbot in my head, of course, painted by Martha Wells’ writing & my own imagining and the beautiful fan art that people make of the book on Tumblr, & I think that’s the one I’m likely to always love best.

listen to this

I don’t listen to as many podcasts as I used to—big cooking projects have sort of fallen by the wayside, & I’m not traveling as much, racing through the miles accompanied by a story coming out the speakers, but there are two that are in steady rotation for me still. First is always The Read, with Kid Fury & Crissle, which I’ve listening to ever since my sibling insisted I download it ten years ago. I save it for my chores day, so I can scrub the bathroom & oil the countertops while Crissle cackles in my ear, & their hilarious listener letters keep me moving through the piles of laundry to fold.

Every Outfit is another staple, hosted by Chelsea Fairless & Lauren Garroni. It started as a Sex & the City podcast, mostly—well, really, it started as their Instagram account about the fashion on Sex & the City, but they cover pop culture with a focus on fashion. I like listening to best friends talk to each other, with all the layers of knowledge & old jokes, and there’s something I really enjoy about a glimpse into the shiny, strange world of Los Angeles and its proximity to both the charms and the horrors of the movie industry. It couldn’t be farther from my cloud-covered life in Bellingham, & that’s definitely a huge part of the appeal. Tell me all about your vintage caftans & making indie films & flying around the world with your celebrity stylist wife, please, I can’t get enough of it.

Thank you once again for reading the Dead Letter Department. I’ll see you here again soon, and in the meantime, may whatever winter weather you’ve been trudging through lift enough that you’re at least able to venture out & resupply if you’ve been stuck at home like me.