Ah, weather

When I tell people who are up here in the summer that it rains all the time and they shouldn't move here, they think I'm being funny and trying to discourage people from clogging up the roads. Which is fair, because that's what I'm trying to do. But it's not as if it's not true.

From the weather service:

THE PUGET SOUND AREA HAS RECEIVED ALMOST DAILY RAINFALL SINCE THIS
WET WEATHER PATTERN BEGAN ON DECEMBER 19TH. SOILS REMAIN SATURATED
AND THOSE ON STEEPER SLOPES ARE PRIMED TO GIVE WAY IN LANDSLIDES.

Chance we'll go a full day without rain, based on current forecasts:
Monday: 0%
Tuesday: 6%
Wednesday: 21%
Thursday: 50%

Soooo there's a reasonable chance during some 24-hour period this week we'll break this streak. Whoopee! Wring me out and call me a sponge.

There were 229 suicides in King County in 2004 (King County Medical Examiner's Office 2004 report, which has some really morbidly interesting statistical breakdowns). And you'll note the criteria for determining if it's suicide are pretty strict: if you offed yourself and didn't leave clear evidence, well, who knows?

By method:
95 firearms
44 hanging
41 drugs/poison

(women, btw, all about drugs and poison)

I have to say, hanging? Really? Is it because it's such a classic suicide method?

Anyway, the CDC offers this:

* Most popular press articles suggest a link between the winter holidays and suicides (Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania 2003). However, this claim is just a myth. In fact, suicide rates in the United States are lowest in the winter and highest in the spring (CDC 1985, McCleary et al. 1991, Warren et al. 1983).

229 out of 1,700,000 (ish) for King County = .0135% chance someone kills themself
~31,000 out of 287,000,000 for the US as a whole = .0108% chance someone kills themself (and that's 2000 numbers)

Okay, so there's a lot of room for variance, since the rate is so low that a couple in either direction can throw the local numbers off, but that's a pretty dramatic increase.

Enough for the morbid thoughts, though.