Too Cold

11-30-06

It was a very bad drive home. What normally takes 25 minutes took almost 2 hours. The combination of driving snow and fog kept freezing up the windshield. The wipers kept getting ice built up on them so they weren’t clearing the windshield. The normally excellent heater couldn’t warm the windshield up enough to thaw the ice off it, yet the temperature difference between the interior of the car and the ice on the windshield caused a stress fracture, a long horizontal crack just above the wiper line on the passenger side. The snap of hte break was loud and startling.

The snow was deeper than the undercarriage of the car in far too many places, and the supposed “snow routes” hadn’t received any attention from the sanding crews at all. There were times when I wasn’t sure the car could bull its way through the drifts, and kept expecting to get stranded at any minute because of that.

On the plus side, for the trip home, there was a thick layer of snow on top of hte tick layer of ice, so there was no skidding and slipping and the car sliding off to the side when it slowed. And I was virtually the only car on the road. Apparently, no one else had to work.

I’m very happy for them, and even happier that I didn’t have to deal with other drivers because of it.

The snow is still falling, sometimes almost in blizzard strength.

And if the roads don’t improve by morning, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it in to work. I may be willing, but that’s a dozen miles to go with a car that isn’t big enough to bull its way through those deep drifts.