Well, the storm that is not peripheral decided to come to town today. Starting at about noon we began to see significant accumulations around our building here in Silver Spring. We made our usual trip to Annapolis to do weekly shopping - early - and most of the way home before running into a traffic jam getting off of the freeway and on to New Hampshire Ave. About 1/3 of the travel time was getting half a kilometer onto the exit.

Near our building there is another little hill, a bit steeper than the one next door, which leads down to New Hampshire Ave., and the challenge this time was not getting up that hill to get home but getting around the mini van which was not able to navigate the hill. Fortunately, I had found this work-around several years back when I drove home from Penn State in a veritable blizzard.

We came up an alternate street where the incline was quite a bit less and there was no traffic at all. This storm is not supposed to let up until the wee-small hours of Sunday morning, and - just to stay consistent for bizarreness of our weather this season - its last several hours of life will be as rain and freezing rain.

I wouldn’t really care, but Alana needs to get to a meeting in West Virginia Sunday afternoon and, of course, up there that will all be snow. Who knows what the roads will look like ?

So - it’s nice to get something that decisively looks like a storm (even with the caveat at the end), but I dread facing the mountain roads in West Virginia tomorrow afternoon.