Portland doesn't believe in salt either. It is thus looking more and more likely that despite being only five or six miles apart, my parents and I won't be spending Christmas together this year.

Our bus system has also announced reduced service coverage, as of yesterday, presumably for the duration of the Snowpocalypse. This is not quite as disastrous for nondrivers as it probably is in Seattle, because the light rail system is still mostly up and running and the bus coverage overall is, I think, denser than it is Up There. But it's definitely going to further limit folks' ability to get around, and that's not helping right now....

Part of the trouble, of course, is that neither Portland nor Seattle has the hardware infrastructure to cope with this much snow and ice hanging around for this long -- for the entirely reasonable reason that we don't generally need that level of equipment or supplies more than once every couple of decades. But we're reaching the point when we definitely need some resources from somewhere to cope with the present situation -- and I wish the media were spending a little more time on that subject than on endless "the roads are mostly still a mess, and here are pictures of people out sledding and building snowmen" coverage.