I keep an eye on the widget that shows a weather loop of the Pacific Ocean. It’s often a good indicator of the kind of weather that we can expect here. This indicator of wind and cloud movements has shown most of the storms that have eventually made landfall here in the Pacific Northwest. There have been 4 big ones in the past months, including a howling monster that brought havoc and power outages to Seattle and blew out 1/4 of the trees in Stanley Park. This information has left me a bit — uneasy, shall we say? — as I see this on my screen this afternoon:

Now, I’m no expert, but this looks like pretty rough stuff for both Santa’s sleigh and our coast. Since I have a very important flight eastward in about 2 days, I hope this thing looks worse than it actually is. After all, as I said, I’m no expert.