More Winter Fun

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.

Puny mayhem

Some kind of arctic blast blew through here at around 8:00 p.m. “What’s going on outside the window ?” Alana asks.

“How do I know ? I’m in the kitchen,” I respond.

Wander over to the door on to the lanai and now I see what she means. Visibility zero. It looks like a snow blower - I’ve never seen weather like this in my life. Reminds me of the winter storm scene from “March of the Penguins."

After midnight now and the temperature has dropped to -8C, heading for a low of -13C overnight, and the puny amount of snow that got deposited early in the evening has turned the neighboring apartment complex into the Ice Capades.

Seriously, there is a Montgomery County fire truck that cannot get up the little hill that always gives our neighbors trouble when it hasn’t been salted. This is a really little hill, honestly - maybe a 5 degree incline. But when it’s covered with ice it might as well be Mount Everest.

This is the way the whole season has been - occasional freak storms that create havoc out of ridiculous metrics - this is less than an inch of snow but it’s brought traffic accidents and mayhem.

I can’t imagine what it must be like in Boston.

No power outage so far, thank goodness, despite the 60 mph winds which just keep coming.

One more shot of Aquavit, I think, before I call it a night.