There is a supposed “large-ish” wintry ice storm headed our way, threatening to start dumping a nasty icy/rain mixture sometime during the wee hours of the morning. Two of the local weather broadcasts are extremely fond of showing color coded maps of possibly affected areas whenever there is a predicted weather ‘event’. Usually my town is the boring ‘will just be receiving rain’ blue on the map, but tonight, well we’ve been bumped up to ‘batten down the hatches’ pink. The town that I live in is in a valley, so we usually don’t receive the more severe weather–it goes further north to West Virginia. However (and I think that my level of excitement over this shows how much more I need to work on getting out of the house more often), according to channels 7 and 10 weather broadcasts, my town is supposed to get the brunt of the storm and they’re predicting that we could actually end up with almost an inch of freezing rain. That and it seems like there’s some new alert during every other commercial break–as if anyone within a 50 mile radius isn’t aware that something nasty is supposed to come through, since they only started warning us (repeatedly) about the possibility of severe weather since yesterday (that would be Wednesday) afternoon.
Almost an inch doesn’t sound like very much but I’ve been through three winters out here and let me tell you–freezing rain storms suck with a capital S. Having spent the better part of 15+ years in Idaho (and for many of those years I learned how to not drive like an idiot on snowy roads) I’m pretty used to bad road conditions and even having to drive when the overall conditions are poor. Out here though, this freezing rain makes it hazardous to even step foot out your front door. Your best bet is to just stay inside and wait out the storm and let everything melt a little.
Usually everything around here, (city, county, schools, etc) all shut down anytime there’s even a hint that the weather might be bad. Unfortunately, my place of employment can’t shut down for one reason or another. Which means that unless I totally feel unsafe on the roads and want to use up PTO, I still get to go in to work. Most of the time it isn’t a really huge deal as I live about 10 minutes from workplace and I drive the back way which means there isn’t a lot of traffic. I’m still undecided about what I’m going to do in the morning if it’s crappy though–it isn’t that I’m worried about my driving abilities; I worry about all the other drivers out there and with Owen in the car, it just isn’t worth the potential for a bad accident. So I guess we’ll see what the morning brings.
I’m still kind of excited though–ooh bad weather! Almost like when you were a kid and wishing that the snow would fall so hard so you’d have a snow day the next day.