Pea-sized hail and lightning over most of North Seattle.
Level 3 is when animals of all kinds begin dropping out of the sky and speaking in tongues. Call me when that happens.
Edit: I’ve been informed (thanks, Mom!) that this was apparently not hail, but instead graupel. What the crapel is graupel? Read on, with text from the Glossary of Meteorology:
“graupel—Heavily rimed snow particles, often called snow pellets; often indistinguishable from very small soft hail except for the size convention that hail must have a diameter greater than 5 mm. Sometimes distinguished by shape into conical, hexagonal, and lump (irregular) graupel.”
Hunh.
I love my adopted Emerald city, but there are times when I just want to roundly smack every journalist who works here. Take a gander at three consecutive headlines from the Seattle P-I last week.



“SNOWED UNDER.” Yes, all 6 terrifying inches of it.
“START PRAYING NOW.” Is this about the snow or the bus collision in which no one was hurt?
“WILL IT EVER STOP?” It has.
This is not journalism, this is sensationalism. Seattle, take a deep breath and stop your wild, flailing freak-out over winter weather.