I have not been to that McMenamins, but if you have never been to any McMenamin's, they are kind of fun for their quirkiness. I like to call them one of the good parts of the "keep Portland weird" vibe.

I can't speak to how the antique shopping is in Kalama, but if you want to stay some place different from most hotels, trying out a McMenamin's hotel would be a great option.

A very interesting hobby and motive to explore. I can definitely offer a couple recommendations to further your plan.

> Sno-Isle Regional Library

> Snohomish County, excluding Woodway

> Island County

Sno-Isle is the library system for most of Snohomish and Island Counties. I've visited two, and they're both good ones if you want to explore:

• The Snohomish Library is fairly new and quite nice (as it darn well better be, considering the size of its share of my property tax bill). It's close to a touristy historic downtown area along a river with lots of little shops, with plenty of dining options for lunch, or the parking lot is a good starting place for a jog or bike ride on the Centennial Trail. A few dining options include Spada Farm House Brewery (typical brewpub), The Repp (a bit upscale, but reasonably priced), and Snohomish Pie Company (I haven't tried it, but I hear their pot pies are great).

• The Mukilteo Library is also new and nice. It backs right up to a gulch that serves as a nice park with a few short hiking trails. After you see the library, you'll want to continue along highway 525 to the waterfront. On the way there, you will pass the Future of Flight Museum, which sometime this year should start hosting the Boeing Factory tour again (it stopped during the pandemic) if that interests you. The waterfront park charges for parking, but it's worth it. Arnies is a somewhat upscale restaurant near there, but my choice for lunch would be Diamond Knot Brewery. Then take a walk-on ferry ride. There's not much extra to see on the other side unless you have time to bring your car and drive further on Whidbey Island, but you can get a coffee near the terminal, and I think the Clinton library is within walking distance of the terminal. The main motivation is simply that the ferry rides are really pleasant on sunny day. If it's starting to get chilly when you get back to Mukilteo, clam chowder from Ivar's is a classic for a Mukilteo visitor.

> Lewis County, excluding Mossy Rock, Napavine, Pe Ell, Vader

> Pacific County

> Timberland Regional Library

Timberland Regional Library covers much of Lewis County and the areas west of there.

• Centralia would be my top pick there. The town is really similar to Snohomish - a small historic downtown with lots of antique shops and a mix of bars and restaurants. The library was built with one of the original Carnegie grants, although has since then been expanded. It's right in the middle of a typical city park, with a monument for the Centralia massacre, if you want to learn some history. I also think the historic train station nearby is kind of neat. There aren't as many dining options, and my choice would be McMenamin's Olympic Club. It's not as nice as some of the newer McMenamin's, but like most of their restaurants, it has it's own unique quirkiness.

• Honorable mention - I have not visited the Ilwaco library, and it's a long drive, but it looks like it also is part of Timberland, and Ilwaco is in a great area. Cape Disappointment Lighthouse is a must-visit stop on this trip. If you have time, also see the North Head lighthouse, before making your way to Long Beach. I don't know dining options, but Long Beach is probably the better bet for lunch, and maybe to get some saltwater taffy.

> Chelan County

• Leavenworth, any time of year, but winter might be its most scenic. I've not been to the library, but the town is Bavarian-themed tourist trap in an incredibly scenic part of the state. It might turn out not to be your thing, but you will want to visit Leavenworth at least once to say you did it. They have a big Oktoberfest, which is much too crowded for my taste, but on less crowded days the town is rather charming, despite the kitschiness of it. Beer and brats are available from multiple places, and I don't have a specific preference for any of the options for brats. Icicle Brewing is popular and good for a local pub. My own favorite restaurant there gets overlooked by probably most people, because it's in a basement, it looks cheap, and the service isn't always the best, but King Ludwigs has great German food (not to be confused with Ludwig's Gasthaus). This might also turn out not to be your thing, but personally I'd put just about anything on their menu that is served with spaetzle and rotkraut up against any German food I've had anywhere else.

The FCC broadband map is a decent starting place, followed by the websites of the ISP's indicated:

https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov

They did a major overhaul a few months ago that should significantly reduce the inaccuracies, but at a minimum, knowing what ISP's report to the FCC that they offer service in your area gives you a hint who to contact and confirm.

It looks like Lumen (formerly Centurylink) and St. John's Telephone

No specific recommendations for dispersed camp sites, but regarding dog behavior, one of the things that we have found to help (at the suggestion of a trainer) is giving the dog an assignment. Telling a dog to be quiet doesn't mean much to it. Approaching it, getting it's attention, and commanding it to follow obedience exercises it knows by heart is a distraction, and also helps it focus on something normal, which can help lower its stress. This may require an increase in training frequency to make successful.

I should probably clarify - although it will be cold, whether or not it snows is highly dependent on whether the precipitation sticks around until the cold arrives.

Don't plan on snow just yet. The forecast currently suggests things it will dry out before it gets cold enough for snow.

Good luck with work either way. I hope you get some time off one way or another.

TLDR: It will briefly get very cold next week.

The forecast map I'm sharing is temperatures for next Thursday morning (Feb 23).

In between now and then, we'll get normal February rain over the weekend and continuing into Tuesday. As the cold air heads our way, there's a chance of some snowfall, but don't hold your breath.

Then Wednesday night the thermometer plummets. This shows 12 to 16 degrees for the Seattle area. And is that -4 to -8 in Spokane?

Keep in mind, the forecast is almost 7 days out. The forecast definitely could moderate, but we're still probably looking at temps in the low 20's across much of the west side, and single digits on the east side.

For what it is worth, low 20's is the National Weather Service forecast. This is the University of Washington Forecast. I think the NWS runs a similar model, but their staff seem to often adjust the forecast closer to the normal for a given time of year when we're more than a couple days out.

Either way, it would take a major change in the forecast to not break the record low for February 23 In Seattle (28 degrees), although Spokane stands a chance of keeping its record (2 degrees).

This weekend would be a good time to do any prep you might normally do for cold weather (cover hose bibs and sensitive plants, etc).

Because of the distance of the Cascadia Subduction Zone from Seattle, the local shaking will be more comparable to a magnitude 7 quake directly beneath Seattle. The biggest concerns for this quake scenario are the regional scale of the effects, and especially the dangers on the coast of the tsunami that will likely accompany it.

Here are the USGS predicted intensity maps showing this, as well as the 2001 Nisqually quake and the 2023 Turkey quake for comparison:

Magnitude 9.3 Cascadia Subduction Zone - Predicted - Modified Mercalli Intensity in Seattle 7 to 7.5

Magnitude 7.2 Seattle Fault Zone - Predicted - Modified Mercalli Intensity in Seattle 8 to 8.5

Magnitude 6.8 2001 Nisqually Quake - Modified Mercalli Intensity in Olympia: 6.5 to 6.8

Magnitude 7.8 Turkey 2003 Quake - Modified Mercalli Intensity: Over 9 in the worst affected areas

With that said, construction methods and quality matter a lot. The shaking in the Gaziantep, where a historically significant castle received major damage that has been shown widely in the news, the Mercalli Intensity is estimated at 6.7 - similar to what Olympia experienced in 2001.

Specifically because Glacier Peak * is in a wilderness area, and it could take as many as 20 helicopter flights into the wilderness area to install permanent seismic monitors.

It's the same group that sued to have a historic fire lookout (Green Mountain) removed, because the Forest Service used a helicopter to move supplies to restore it. I suppose one could make a case that preservation of a historic site in a wilderness area was not adequate cause to justify the use of helicopters, but they insisted for years after the work was completed that the only acceptable remedy was removal of the lookout. The fiasco didn't end until Congress passed an amendment to the Wilderness Act allowing the lookout to stay.

Every time I see Wilderness Watch come up in the news, I find myself debating whether it's just another law firm that likes to cash in on reimbursement of legal fees masquerading as a conservation group, or if a bunch of obsessive-compulsive types who couldn't find an HOA to ruin simply banded together with misconstruing the intent of the Wilderness Act as their common goal.

* Glacier Peak is considered by the USGS to be the 15th most hazardous volcano in the US, out of the 161 volcanoes they assessed. Its ranking in the "very high threat" category has made the fact of its very limited monitoring a major concern:

https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2018/5140/sir20185140.pdf

The Bolt Creek Fire was on federal land. It's not managed by the DNR.

In fact, a big portion of the burn area was wilderness area, so it's deliberately not managed. If the Forest Service tried, there are several groups of lawyers waiting and ready to sue them, including the group in Montana that is currently trying to prevent the USGS from monitoring our volcanoes adequately.

I'm pretty sure it is a popular place to wave watch.

I remember my aunt taking me there on a very cold day decades ago.

Thanks for the article.

In retrospect it seems really obvious, but I like Colorado's idea of having a less serious charge for a less level of impairment. Making 0.05% an infraction with a fine would still have a deterrent effect. It actually would probably be easier to prosecute, since infractions do not have to proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I'm not necessarily going to disagree, but I do wonder if that slight reduction in the legal limit really addresses the issue effectively.

Certainly it would be expected that a lower limit would incrementally reduce the rate of accidents, but by how much?

Actually converting the more strict law into results means more strict enforcement. Will it be more effective to focus that enforcement on mildly impaired drivers, or on better enforcement of seriously impaired drivers.

We aren't currently achieving adequate enforcement, treatment, etc of drivers operating over 0.08%...often well over. Will law enforcement even be able to identify drivers a meaningful fraction of drivers operating over 0.05%?

Of course, there's the people like me who will obey the law whatever the limit is, but I already stay well away from 0.08%.

I see someone else posted an article discussing Colorado's law, where they have an 0.08% limit for a DUI, but a lower limit of 0.05% for a less serious charge of Driving While Ability Impaired.

I think I like that idea - there is some level of escalation in seriousness of the violation correlated to increase in risk. We do similar with speeding versus reckless driving.

The mills that are still operating, you mean. I don't doubt they've seen business pick up, but the mill capacity doesn't even exist to match what was being harvested before the turn of the 21st century.

For most of the post-war era, Washington timber harvests ranged form 5-7 billion board feet per year. The record year was 1973, with 7.8 million board feet.

The federal actions in the late 80's pushed it to mostly below 5 billion board feet. By 2000, the 5-year average was 4.2 billion board feet per year. The overall average going back to 1900 was 4.9 billion board feet per year.

The latest year state data are compiled for is 2017, at which point, the total was 2.8 billion board feet - just over 1/3 of the historic maximum, and a modest bit over 1/2 the previous century's average.

https://www.dnr.wa.gov/TimberHarvestReports

The timber industry has estimates out up through 2021, which also came in at 2.8 billion board feet:

https://data.workingforests.org/doc/WFPA_Industry_Econ_Impacts_2021_b.pdf

Washington is genuinely harvesting far less timber than it has historically, and the trend in Oregon has been similar.

It's not just the federal government.

Demand has also fallen as population growth has slowed, waste has decreased, wood heating has decreased, and other materials have increased in use (concrete, steel, and composites).

Also, Canada has been making up an increasing share of North America's timber supply.

That's because you ARE a mastermind in comparison to these guys.

You should see the guns they were caught with. A few news articles have carried photos of them. The idea that the modifications they did in any way improved them is almost beyond belief.

In fact, the modifications they did specifically made them guilty of federal firearms crimes, for no benefit to themselves at all, so they're already poster boys for the very last point in your post.

No strong opinions about it. The FBI and DOJ will rap up their investigation before they take these guys to trial, and we'll find out more at trial if anything.

> I don't for one second believe these clowns did all that just to get a little bit of cash.

Short story time:

A few years back, a substation in my area was "attacked." The crew responding to the outage found one of the perpetrators on top of the equipment near his bolt cutters, badly burned, and he later died.

Investigators found out his girlfriend had been with him, whom they arrested. It turned out they were meth addicts, stealing cable. That's all it was. They were so out of their minds that they saw those big fat cables and thought they could walk away with them from a live substation. She left him to die. Didn't even call 911. I don't have a link to this story, because my local paper didn't keep a lot of older stories online after a website update, but there's tons of similar stories to be found from a search for "thief electrocuted."

https://powerlineman.com/lforum/showthread.php?7508-Burned-copper-thief

If thieves like that were smart or sober enough to get money the easy way, they would get a job and show up on time every day. They come up with hair-brained schemes like shutting down substations, but not thinking that maybe there could be security cameras or their phones might be trackable because they're not smart.

> The only possible way it’s true is if they were so incredibly stupid

It's pretty unlikely they knew which substation they needed to hit to take out power where that store is. After all, do you know which substation feeds your area? It might even have genuinely required multiple due to the fact that power companies try to set up their grids so that areas have multiple lines feeding a given area.

> Why would I read Wikipedia

Because it was a convenient place for me to suggest for some further discussion of the challenge of knowing when Jesus' birth actually took place (I ask you to at least consider for the sake of discussion Jesus as a real person, regardless of whether you personally believe He existed), and how Christmas came to be celebrated when it is.

> as for the birth of Christ it was not Christmas Eve

Don't you think there is at least a 1 in 365 chance?

Personally as a Christian, I never worried about whether we identified the correct date to celebrate Christmas. Who we believe Jesus to be and why His birth would be worth celebrating is really the point.

1. I will start by restating my main point to be more clear. Your comment on solstice being chosen to convert pagans is not need to know information because:

A) A person who considers the birth of Jesus to be significant (presumably due to their religious beliefs) is not going to find their beliefs challenged by the point, "nobody recorded the actual date Jesus was born, but because some early Christians thought celebrating it on a date that pagans already used for a holiday might help convert some of them* they chose to also use that holiday."

If you think the theory that Christians would want to convert pagans is shocking news to Christians that will scandalize them away from their faith, you don't seem to know much about Christianity.

B) Nobody who doesn't consider the birth of Jesus significant is going to change their observance or non-observance of Christmas based on the same.

2. I didn't offer a Wikipedia reference as proof. I offered it as a place where there is a summary of some of the discussion illustrating the complexity of understanding how Christmas came to be celebrate around the time of the solstice.

There are two very common corallary forms of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy that I like to call "argumentum ad Wikipediam" and "argumentum contra Wikipediam." You are demonstrating the latter.

Which is ironic, because the alternative that has been presented is to accept the authority of an unknown person posting on the internet. Or to follow the argument back to its known source with the 18th century Lutheran preacher Paul Jablonski who promoted the idea the date was chosen for pagan reasons in order to portray Catholicism as a pagan-influenced corruption of Christianity.

3. The rest of your post seems like it might be in reference to the Bible. You really didn't clarify what you're talking about. But the topic now at hand was about the date of Christmas, which the Bible does not give any obvious clues about, and I don't see a useful reason to expand the discussion to the Bible in this thread.

* Edit - I apologize for not noticing before your are not the same poster as I previously respond to. I have edited my post to remove an reference to the prior poster's words as your own.

> and all of you should know that the Winter Solstice was hijacked by the Catholic Church to convert the pagans just like Easter and every other holiday.

There's not much need to know it since it really has no effect whether a person considers Christmas important or not.

Also, while that suggestion might not be completely without relevance, it's also not an argument with historical evidence, and it's far from the full background on how, lacking any records of a date when Jesus was born, various groups of Christians around the Roman world gradually consolidated on December 25 as the mutual date to celebrate it. The solstice is naturally significant to almost every non-tropical culture. Early Christian writers sometimes drew on traditional titles for Jesus like "Light of the World" to suggest the solstice - the beginning of days of increasing light - was a fitting time to celebrate His birth.

For a short summary of some of the theories on how December 25th was settled on, you could start with the Wikipedia article on Christmas,

From the USGS comments, it sounds like it is actually related, but still not a specific concern:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73821036/executive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorda_Plate

> ...in the vicinity of the Mendocino triple junction – the region where the Pacific, North America, and Juan de Fuca/Gorda plates meet. Focal mechanism solutions indicate that rupture occurred as a result of strike-slip faulting on a steeply dipping fault striking either southeast or southwest. The location, depth and faulting mechanism indicate that this event likely occurred within the subducting Gorda Plate.

Since the Gorda plate is described by the USGS as connected to the Juan de Fuca plate, and the eastern boundary of the Gorda Plate is considered part of the Cascadia subduction zone, this does seem pretty relevant.

However, they also note that this level of activity is pretty typical in this area. They mention a M6.2 earthquake only 20 km away last year, and 40 quakes over M6 in the general vicinity over the last century, including 6 over M7.

Not really. It is true that geologists have identified some patterns in large quakes causing smaller quakes at significant distances.

A major quake that takes hundreds of years to build up stress in a fault, however, would almost certainly have to be just about ready to slip regardless for a smaller quake to trigger them. I can't tell you exactly what that means, but I would guess it would be a matter of causing a quake that was going to occur "soon" to instead occur maybe a few months, or perhaps a year or two earlier.

Unless geologists identify a pattern of seismicity along the Cascadia subduction zone that suggests to them a rupture is imminent, I'm sticking to my plan of general readiness to shelter in place (whether sheltering in place or evacuating is the best option depends where you live, and what the disaster is): Keep at least 3 days worth of food and water, and a way to stay safely warm if the power is out, etc. Visit ready.gov if you want more disaster prep advice.

We keep a well-stocked pantry, my camping gear serves for cooking when the power is out, and if we completely drained our water heater, and it didn't rain, I also have a camping water filter good enough to remove bacterial contaminants, or I can boil water to help tie me over for a couple weeks while waiting for relief supplies to reach the whole region.

I think that a politically motivated group trying to disrupt our grid is a possibility that has to be considered. After all, the article does cite the case of three men recently convicted for just that.

But the article describes a variety of different attacks, and it's not clear to me all of them are planned with political motivations. It seems just as likely that some of them could be unrelated acts of vandalism from the same types of people who shoot up road signs or start fires for fun. And metal theft is another possible motive for the cases described as using hand tools and chains.

These sound like folks I should meet!