It's gorgeous and ambient and I'm more than a little jealous.

Places like that are haunting when all b yourself, like you can feel the ghosts of the past around you.

This is the same room where I had my high school prom 15 years ago! ah, memories.

It's lovely, I've been there. Now then, monarchist??? WTF??? Please tell me you're kidding.

Don't get cabin fever if you get snowbound, Dan. We'll know if next week's column looks like this:

All work and no play makes Dan a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Dan a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Dan a dull boy.
...
REDRUM! REDRUM!

Monarchist. you're a riot!

btw- it snows here in The Lou relatively often, but people still drive like S. You'd think people would be used to it by now, but sadly that is not the case.

Ah, the old Conrad Hilton. Originally the Sullivan, I belieive. Something Irish sounding.

Take a look out onto Michigan Avenue and remember the riots. My partner's mother worked there in the 60's, and she recalled standing at a window and watching all hell break loose below her. They wouldn't let her leave the hotel because of the violence. Being a single mother, it was quite upsetting.

She also rode on an elevator with Elvis Presley, and said he was the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes on. This was in the handsome Elvis days, not the bloated jumpsuit days.

It's a drag to work at a hotel during a blizzard. You pretty much have to bail at the beginning, or you are stuck there, doing all sorts of odd jobs you don't usually do. And they don't even give you a private room. You're crammed in a suite with all the other poor schmucks who are stuck there.

Now you know what all us North/East transplants mean when we roll our eyes at how badly Seattle handles any weather besides lackadasical rain.

Chicago will get a foot of snow, but the streets will be 10 times better than any of Seattle's or the metro area's.

you know...Although I agree with all the "Seattle shits a brick when snow falls" argument (it's true, they do). You got to realize that this city has no infrastructure to deal with those situations like cities in the midwest/east coast/where ever do (trucks, plows, work force, etc). And this cities has lots and lots of hills...steep hills. Combine those two things and you get some pretty difficult driving conditions from time to time. That's all I'm saying...some of the hysteria is justified...not all but some.

Looks like the set of some Yurpeen expressionist film...

I hope you took full advantage and did a polka around the ballroom.

I spent the AM defending Seattle's reaction to snow—pointing out that, indeed, we don't have the plows, salters, or flat streets that they have here.

Still, Seattle would shit bricks, collectively, if we went through what Chicago did last night. And the city is moving, everything back to normal. The local TV news, of course, is over-hyping it a bit—that's what they do. I wish we would get a foot in Seattle sometime -- complete with, no shit, thunder and lightening all night long (so loud it woke me up). The heads of our local teevee news personalities would freaking explode. It would be like that scanners movie.

Looks like my bedroom.

this city is built with shit bricks so in the end it's really worked out for us pretty well, don't you think?

K @ 8 is right. There is a one-word reason why Chicago's streets are better than Seattle's after a blizzard.

That word is SALT. Seattle, which does not have the plows and removal equipment that colder cities have, could salt the hell out of the streets (Denny Way, anyone?).

But no.

Salt destroys cars, destroys streets, and would destroy Puget Sound if permitted here.

That's the Drake, right? If it is, I got kicked out of the VIP breakfast room on the top floor a few years ago for wearing jeans. Oh, and I was unshaven and hung over. But I need some eggs. Bad.

I'd much rather have the city more or less shut down for a couple of days every few years due to a sprinkle of snow than pay the millions it would take to purchase, maintain, store, and staff the snow-removal equipment which would sit completely idle 9 years out of 10. Even sand costs about $2,000 per truckload, and de-icer is much more costly. There's also the issues of damage to vehicles and environmental damage to consider. The way I see it, if you just can't deal with the way Seattle suffers paralysis every few years from a bit of snow, well, there are plenty of other cities that I'm sure would handle it more to your taste. Rather than force Seattle to adapt to you, perhaps a move is in your future.

I mean, if we had the three months of constant snow that midwestern cities do as a matter of course, then obviously it would be cost-effective for us to be more proactive in snow removal. But here it is not. Stay home if you can. You know perfectly well the roads are going to suck if it snows at all.

I've lived here 47 years. I know about Cascade Cement - that wet, slippery shit we get here is very different from the dry powder snow of less-damp regions. I know about the hilliness of the area and how bizarrely the microclimates are affected by that (Kent, for example, got about 6 inches of snow and turned into a skating rink, whereas Auburn had virtually nothing). I know that 4WD or AWD helps you go, but it doesn't do a damned thing to help you corner or stop any more safely than anyone else. I'm a cautious and careful driver in adverse conditions. But I still stay the hell off the road when there's two inches of compact ice on it, I light a fire in my woodstove, and I relax with a book. I don't work for 911, so no one will die if I don't make it in.

Now, I know some employers aren't reasonable about this, and Monday had a "perfect storm"-type confluence of factors exacerbating conditions, but every bad snowfall in my memory has caused nightmarish commutes for those caught in it. With the predictions for snow Monday afternoon, I'm really surprised more people didn't head home early. I lucked out; I left Burien early and got through Kent before it turned into a parking lot (it was snowing like a mad bastard, but hadn't iced up yet).

The Chicago Hilton is NOT the Drake!

Although they are both Hiltons. But that's not important right now.

The Important Thing To Know is that The Drake is MUCH classier than the Chicago Hilton.

Well, maybe not that important. But still....

Dan, you've been here long enough to see some big snow. Don't you remember 12/26/1996 and a few days after that?

I suppose you weren't here on 12/17/1990, though. Or in 89-90, or late 85, etc. We do get a foot of snow every few years. Just not as much as we did back in the 70s. (Three feet of snow one night when I was in 1st grade.)