In which - snow and roads and snowy roads and checkerboard floors.....

Sometimes it doesn't take much....

This was a couple of Saturdays ago. It was pretty unexpected. A 30% chance of snow showers morphed into a quick 2.5". With some rain we'd had a few days earlier, there was no salt on the road, and it got slick for awhile. There was even an accident down at the three-way intersection at the bottom of our road - the house on the corner had its fence partially taken down by a car for what Maddy said was at least the fourth time in seven years. (No injuries save for the fence.) It was about an hour and a half before the Highway Department was able to get a salt truck out, but by noon the road was clear. No more than a couple hours' inconvenience.

But this.....

Yikes.












All over the same amount of snow.

"Looks like they underestimated it," Maddy said as we watched Georgia officials stammering and blustering their way through a late-night news conference. "If you don't deal with snow and ice that often, you don't realize how much of a mess it can make. It really doesn't take much." She looked at me. "It reminds me a little of something that happened here back in, I think, December 1999."

"Snow?"

She shook her head. "Freezing rain. Even worse. We were supposed to have rain that day, but in the afternoon - after the temperature went above freezing. When I left for work around seven, it was cloudy, but there was nothing on the radar. Then, on the way in, I started seeing an occasional raindrop on the windshield. I also saw when I passed the time and temperature sign on the bank down by CVS that it was 26F. Well, I got to work about seven-twenty, pulled into the lot and parked - just as it started raining fairly hard. By the time I got to the door I had already almost faceplanted twice in my high heels because the rain was freezing as fast as it was falling. Had I been five minutes later, I would have been stranded. As it was, it was me and seven other people in the building for most of the morning, until they could get salt trucks out and treat the roads. Up until then, we'd had no snow or anything. By noon, though, everything was cleared out and by two PM, it was fifty-three degrees. But that really was unexpected. I hate to say that they told them so down in Atlanta, but they did. They had a winter storm warning. Just because it was issued early that morning didn't make it any less valid."

~*~

So anyway, I had a weird dream last night....

Remember the story from our Woodstock trip about John Ashton and the rest of the band nearly getting stranded when it started snowing while they were out at that bar? Well, I dreamed that we were hanging out in the bar with them that night. When it came time to go, it turned out that Maddy, instead of Red October, had her first car, Stormy Llewellyn - aka a bright turquoise 1993 Geo Storm.....
(Image courtesy of www,conceptcarz,com -couldn't find an actual photo of Stormy to scan in...)

"Wait..." Maddy said, looking over my shoulder. "You did?"

"I did. By the time we left, it was snowing. Now in the dream, I don't seem to remember John being drunk. You handed him the keys. We put Richard and Tim Butler in the back..."

"Proving it was indeed a dream," she said. "You couldn't have fit comfortably in the back of that car, never mind two guys over six feet tall. Did we make it back?"

"Yeah. No problem."

"Totally a dream, then. That little car could not handle snow. We would have ended up buried in a snowdrift somewhere off of Mink Hollow Road." She went to find the watering can for the plants in the window.

(I'm NOT telling her about what happened with me and John in the dream once we got back. *Evil grin*)

~*~

In other news, we redid the living room floor. We had to cut and piece like crazy because we wanted a diamond pattern and the paper was printed straight across like a checkerboard.

Took some work but it was worth it.













I think I'm going to leave the bedroom floor as is, though.....