Hurrah for Friday!
It's a three-day weekend already, with MLK Day on Monday. And then, just today, my southern university announced its closure for Tuesday as well, perhaps extending into Wednesday. Mirabile dictu: snow! Or . . . ice, maybe? In any case, freezing temperatures will sweep down into the swamp lands, terrorizing us warmbloods with lows in the mid-teens. They tell us we're sure to awaken Tuesday morning either to a winter wonderland--3-6 inches (!!) of snow--or a winter nightmare: several inches of freezing rain destined to paralyze traffic, down power lines, and sheathe every surface with a coating of ice.
We don't know which we'll get on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Snow would be lovely! I haven't seen accumulated snow here in over a decade. Ice would be dreadful. Our infrastructure--never a strong point in my cherry-red state--protects against flood, not ice. I think of all the hanging oaks in our neighborhoods, with their gnarled, tentacular branches extending outward in every direction. Beautiful! Shady! Add inches of ice, though, and each limb becomes a potential bomb ready to crash down from the sky.
And the driving! I'm typing from the second floor of my house, and still I wonder if I'm far enough away from the roads to be safe. From my bedroom windows, I can see and hear the constant traffic of the interstate, which cuts through town almost completely elevated. Friends who have lived here longer than I tell of an ice storm in the nineties that shut it all down. You know those signs that say "Bridge may ice in cold weather?" The interstate here is almost all bridge, and in that storm (and perhaps in next week's storm), it was almost all ice.
A worse possibility lurks, my meteorological friends tell me, in a dreaded ice/snow combo: an inviting, snowy surface hiding (and insulating) a nasty layer of ice. Thanks to the snow, the ice stays, melting only a bit under the sun and mixing with the wet snow, only to re-freeze overnight Tuesday/Wednesday.
Snow or ice, we will have a hard time either way, methinks. My partner has an MRI scheduled early Tuesday morning. I have a dentist appointment later that day. I suspect both may need rescheduling--a much bigger deal for the MRI, of course.
We'll be in a worse fix, though, if the power fails. A few years ago, my sister and brother-in-law up in Oklahoma City endured three weeks without power thanks to an ice-storm decimating main powerlines into their neighborhood. They invested in a natural-gas-powered generator that guarantees they stay toasty no matter what. We have nothing of the sort here (no natural gas hookups). Our only comfort lies in the fact that our freezes don't last long. Temperatures inevitably rise. But it could be a tough few days for us and the cats.
Oh, well.
Meanwhile: I'm preaching next Sunday! More on that later.
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