Are the Seahawks the Red-Headed Step-Children of the NFL?

The Super Bowl is this weekend!!

Two football teams, the best commercials advertising execs can come up with, food, drink, friends and Bruno Mars.

Apparently it's cold in New Jersey. Everyone keeps harping on it. Bruno Mars said yesterday during a press conference ("I've never had to do a press conference before a performance.") that his mic felt like a popsicle during rehearsals.

Well, at least both of the teams competing this year are used to cold weather. It was meant to be! I mean, it would be pretty sad if the two teams were the San Diego Chargers and the Miami Dolphins, right?

If you know me at all you know I live in Washington state, and therefor I am a Seahawks fan.

Perhaps I shouldn't say "therefor" because when I lived in the Bay Area I was not a Raiders or 49ers fan. Nope.

But see, Washington is my home state. I was born here, and although I did live in California for many years, I have now lived here longer than there.

I am a Washingtonian.

But besides all that, I believe the Seattle Seahawks are a very special football team with the most awesome fans.

There is this palpable feeling around these parts that the Seahawks are never going to be taken seriously.

My husband says it's as if they're the red-headed step-children of the NFL.

It's true that the Hawks were not contenders for many years. They were just this cute little football team way up in the Pacific Northwest (where is Seattle again?) trying to make a go of it. As far as I can recall, pretty much any team who played them during my childhood came away with a win.

But all of that changed eight years ago. In 2006, just two weeks after my son was born, the Seattle Seahawks played the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl.

I'm just gonna say it. The Hawks were ROBBED!

Don't you say no they weren't! I watched that game and every single unfair call made by the refs during it. The Steelers whined their way to the win.

Eight years and a ton of work later there doesn't seem to be a whole lot more respect for this team than there ever has been.

Sure, they say Wilson is great, Lynch is the "Beast" and Haushka is an excellent kicker. But Sherman is vilified for his little rant about Crabtree (5 seconds after making the play that won them the game) and we fans, the raucous and passionate 12th Man, are just seen as annoying.

Not to mention the fashion faux pas one female commentator made wearing a red coat as she reported outside Century Link Field before the NFC Championship game against the 49ers. I mean, really? Yeah, she got a lot of flack for that.

This year, I just know that because the Broncos have a few Super Bowl trophies, the Seahawks will be seen as the underdogs. That's OK, though, I think they like it like that. I think it pushes them harder.

But let me tell you: The Seattle Seahawks and the 12th Man are a force to be reckoned with. I know those guys are going to play their hearts out this Sunday. They want it, and they want it bad.

#GoHawks!

Images found on the Seattle Seahawks Memes Facebook page.

The Beauty All Around

I am the last person I would have thought would ever be into taking photos. I distinctly remember many years ago thinking I would never need to even own a camera because I'm visually impaired, so pictures probably just wouldn't be a big part of my life. Fine for others to take all the pictures they want, but me? Naw.

And then some important things started to happen. Like my wedding. Then a baby. Scrapbooking was suggested to me when my daughter was born and I totally poo-pooed it. "I can't see well enough to scrapbook!", I said.

How wrong I was. About all of it. Not only did I still need to care about pictures, but yes, I could scrapbook if I wanted to!

But that's not even the point. By thinking in such a narrow way, I was limiting my experiences, limiting their impact on me and not fully APPRECIATING them.

Shame on me.

I read the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold several years ago. In it was a perspective changer for me:

Now I love taking pictures. Of everything from the awesome to the mundane. Because I am visually impaired they will never be the caliber of a professional photographer. I don't care. Besides, there are so many widgets and whatnot to help me make them look better. The pictures I take mean I am present, that I am PAYING ATTENTION.

This is why Instagram is so freaking fabulous!

That book quote may have given me a great way to think about photographs, but having a visual impairment gives me a special perspective as well. Every single time I step outside, I take it all in. I look up at the sky, down at the ground, at my neighbor's house or the car parked on the street. The color of a bright flower will catch my eye and I have to stop and LOOK. Often this requires walking right up to it. Also often, stopping to take a picture affords me a clearer look later on.

Sunsets! Clouds! Flowers! Fall Leaves! My children's faces! My kids catch me staring at them. It's all so BEAUTIFUL to me. I will never take SEEING these things for granted. No. In fact, I cherish the vision I still have because it was nearly taken away from me.

All this is to lead up to sharing some of the Fall beauty I've captured this year, just right around my neighborhood. The colors and contrasts never cease to amaze me.

Sublime September

The background for this quote is a picture I took of our beautiful blue sky!

We here in the Pacific Northwest are having the NICEST September I can remember in the nine years I've been living in Washington.

Seattle almost broke a record for most consecutive days without rain. We are now on the verge, according to a quick soundbite I heard yesterday morning, of setting a record for the least amount of measurable rainfall in August and September. I think that's what the weather guy said.

I kid you not, like clockwork, it usually rains on the first day of school, the day after Labor Day (or 2 days after Labor Day, but whatever). And thus begins our quick decent into Fall....

Not this year! My son wore SHORTS to his first day of school!

Except for ONE cloudy, drizzly day....

....the weather has been PERFECT. Cool, crisp nights and mornings with mild, breezy afternoons and evenings. And SO. MUCH. SUN.

Why Mother Nature is being so nice to us I do not know.

But I'm enjoying it. Even if it means I have to keep shaving my legs.

Because I know all too well what comes next: once this beautiful weather ends, we won't see it again until next Summer.

Are Seattleites "Snow Wimps?"

Many in the lowlands of Western Washington hope for at least one good snowstorm per winter to break up the rainy doldrums, and to let the kids have some winter fun.

And last week we got it!  Here's how things were looking around my house (about 40 miles north of Seattle)....

With MLK day last Monday, the kids got an entire week off of school. I mean, it just kept snowing. It stayed below freezing for an entire 5 days.

And then a little controversy ensued.

A reporter for the LA Times posted an article calling us wimps! Specifically, "Snow wimps: Seattle is shut down by first real snow of the season". Besides that rude headline, Kim Murphy wrote:

• Color Seattle clueless. The city has always marched unarmed into its infrequent battles with snow, and Wednesday's snowstorm was no exception.
• The snowstorm had been forecast to be the worst to hit the Puget Sound region in 30 years, an ominous warning that scared easily scareable Seattleites. 

The kicker to her comments is that she lives in Seattle. The biotch is a backstabber!

Art Thiel of KING5 News wrote a great rebuttall. He pointed out two important points to keep in mind about Seattle snow:

• No downtown that receives snow is as as hilly as Seattle. Period. The Priniciple of Verticality. There's just too much up here to get down safely.
• Wet snow doesn't drift. It gets compacted onto road beds and sidewalks. Plowing and salting helps, but 90 percent of the streets in a metro area as large as Seattle will never see a plow or a salting truck. Seattle cement can only wait for warm rain to wash most of it away.

Let me first admit something. I used to harbor similar feelings to Ms. Murphy's when I first moved back here after having lived in Lake Tahoe, which is over 6,000 feet above sea level and gets lots of snow every winter (except this winter, apparently). I graduated from South Tahoe High and you better believe me when I tell you the snow had to get pretty bad before they called off school. Because of my experience living in the mountains, I too thought Washingtonians were a little overly cautious when it comes to snow.

However, now that we're going through our 9th winter here, I understand the caution. The simple fact is, we are used to rain. Even wind and flooding. We're not used to snow. It doesn't snow here every single winter so we don't put snow preparedness things at the tippy-top of our city planning priorities. And frankly, these days, we simply do not have the money in our state budget.

And like Mr. Thiel pointed out, the snow we get here is the polar (polar, ha!) opposite of the snow Lake Tahoe gets. The variety of snow experienced in the Sierra Nevada mountains is the dry kind. It's not as heavy or sticky or slick.

For this chic to criticize how we handle our snow storms for the Los Angeles Times is ludicrous. LA has not a single leg to stand on when it comes to snow! The rain we're used to here in the Pacific Northwest causes all kinds of problems for the residents of Southern California when they get it. They encounter the same idiot, white-knuckle driving and increase in accidents during rain that we do during snow.

And excuse me, but if a portion of the 405 being shut down can be coined "Carmageddon", we deserve to refer to the storms we just had as "Snowmageddon". When the East Coast has a freaking earthquake they're allowed to freak out a little too. And by the way, I hear there were recently freezing temps in Florida! Shit happens. Ahem.

I just don't understand why she needed to write something critical. Why couldn't she simply report the facts?  She apparently complained on a radio show that her email inbox was being "abused". Aw, I wonder why?