And when it blows, it’s going to be bad. I watched a show on the History Channel tonight, Mega Disasters, which forecasts 18,000 deaths and 31,000 injured when (not if) Mt. Rainier explodes. The biggest risk? The mountain will flash-melt tons of snow up at the peak, which will result in boiling water mixing with pumice and ash pouring down the mountainside. These avalanches/waves will strip all the dirt from the mountain slopes as they go, and pick up other minor debris, like boulders the size of rooms. The whole muddy mess will roar down the mountain, filling valleys with a 40′ to 100′ tall wave of utter destruction with the viscosity of wet concrete and the force of a freight train. Bad News.

The area that will be worst hit is the little towns on the volcano (retarded place for a town), and the city of Tacoma, which is right in the path that the muddy destruction wave thing will take to reach Puget Sound. Fortunately I won’t be subjected to that up in Kirkland, but we will nevertheless be buried under hundreds of tons of ash falling over Seattle and afflicting its 2 million residents with a nasty cough and toxic dust.

Let me just say, for the record, that when that thing starts rumbling, I am getting the hell out of here. I’m not sticking around for pictures like people did when Mt. St. Helens was erupting. I’ll get my pictures off of Flickr after the fact.

Well, with that cheery revelation, I need to go to bed. All that stuff I promised in my last post is coming, I swear… I’ve been without internet since Sunday morning when Jeni & I left Salem, OR, so I haven’t had the opportunity to catch up just yet. In the mean time, I start work at Microsoft tomorrow, and I’d really like to be awake for it.

Good night all, and if you live near the Cascades, keep an eye on your neighborhood volcano.