Okay, this time I pit Mother Nature. I live in Maryland, and for the entire month of January, the weather here has been nothing but complete SHIT. Nevermind that we’ve gotten used to a daily temperature range of 1°-20°F. The cold is a pain in the ass, but survivable. But I am so goddamn sick and tired of finding my car every morning imprisoned in a nice glaze of ice and three inches of snow. I’ve been on jury duty since Thursday, and the courts don’t close unless Judgement Day comes (in which case, they’ll be open two hours late). And to top it off, my company is so freakin’ workaholic that closing for inclement weather is unheard of. So every morning, I go to my car, turn on the heater, and spend 20 minutes freeing it from its icebound tomb. Driving is treacherous, and it doesn’t help that the drivers in Baltimore are already complete morons. Tonight, all I wanted to do was get a jug of 1% milk at 7-11 for cereal, but couldn’t because my car was already locked in ice. Fuck that.
Mother Nature, what the fuck did we do to deserve this? Pollution? Los Angeles was clear and had a high of 64°F yesterday. I don’t buy this global warming crap.
For three years, the DC Metro Area has dealt with sweatering 100°+ summers and bone-chilling, snowbound winters. I think we had about three genuinely nice days last year. I certainly hope this isn’t a permanent feature of our region, or else I’m packing everything I can fit into a suitcase, selling the rest of my crap on EBay, and moving to L.A. I can certainly deal with fair 64° days.
Fuck you, Mother Nature, you stone-cold bitch. Bite me.
Hey, I like this weather. I’ll take this over those dull, drizzly gray things we’ve been getting for the last few years. And my workplace never closes either.
The ice, I could do without, though. Ice sucks. Black ice sucks even worse.
ooh, I agree ! I thought, after last year’s endless and miserable winter, Ma Nature and I had a deal. I would forgive her for it, and never complain about the heat in summer again, if she made the summer nice and this winter tolerable.
Well, the summer was gorgeous, hot, humid, muggy, sunny, and I loved it. I didn’t complain when the humidex rose above forty, because I knew that Ma Nature was counting on my goodwill and I would be rewarded with a tolerable winter.
Ha ! Silly me !
I had to walk home three kilometers through the snow yesterday because the bus never came. Why should a bus be delayed (by over an hour) because a snowstorm? Don’t ask me.
But my thighs are very sore today from fighting through the snow to get home. And, wouldn’t you know it, my streetcar this morning chucked me out before I was ready and I had to walk even more.
All I can conclude is that the Toronto Transit Commission is in cahoots with mother nature. Well, I pit you both.
Took me two and a half hours to drive to work today.
TWO AND A HALF HOURS.
Why? Because the path between my house and were I work was ground zero of this morning’s non-stop snowfall, and there was no way around it. Of course, all the ODOT plows were on Cleveland’s West Side. I live on the East Side, which usually gets twice the snowfall of the West Side.
Because I-90 was literally a sheet of ice, and I had about fifteen to twenty 90-degree spinouts along a half-mile stretch of road. Along one stretch, it was creep forward, slide sideways, straighten out, slide sideways, straighten out, slide, straighten … scary shit. “But you were driving too fast!”, you might say. The speedometer was pegged while this happened - at the bottom. I was going about 3 or 4 MPH.
Seriously, I feel damn lucky that I didn’t get into a bad, traffic-stopping accident on my way in.
I believe “African-American ice” is the preferred term.
I am gwowing weewee of this, too, as Marlene Dietrich would have said. Each weekly snowstorm just piles atop the unmelted snow from the previous storms, and my midcalf snowboots are laughably inadequate for the drifts. Might as well fill ’em up with snow before leaving the house in the morning. Oh—and the neighbors who shovel their walks but never salt them, leaving a nice ice slick for me to skate over.
L.A. is looking better and better . . . all they have are earthquakes, fires and mudslides . . .
I go to school in Maryland (originally from sunny sunny California). I don’t think it’s too bad, probably because I don’t have to shovel and salt the walks or slip and slide my way to the supermarket for food or drive miles and miles to work. Hmm…being a student is a pretty good deal.
I feel your pain. The other night, here in San Jose, the temperature got close to 50 degrees. It was so chilly, I had to pull up the comforter. Before that, it rained nearly half an inch of water. I’ll keep up a stiff upper lip, though, knowing that this too shall pass.
Ooh, I do believe this is the first time I’ve been drive-byed by Eve. I feel honored.
I’m from up north. Bad weather is like comfort food to me. I don’t really feel alive unless I’m trying to prevent a few tons of hurtling steel from spinning off into a ditch or trying to keep myself from freezing to the sidewalk.
Now really hot weather, I turn into a complete sissy. Can’t handle anything above 90 degrees or so–I just hundle under the a/c and whimper.
There is a very simple method to end your suffering. Just fall on one of those neighborhood ice rinks. You get to stay at a nice hospital for a bit then you get to stay home until the weather clears on Doctor’s Orders. There won’t even be a penny out of your pocket thanks to disablity and insurance monies. And all of your neighbors will learn to salt their walks.
All in all a fairly perfect win-win situation.
And you forgot about the nuts in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia. I hear they grow to almost the same size as a human.
