Last night I fell asleep to the dulcet tinkle of sleet against the windows. I hoped that it would be just icy enough to cancel work, but not icy enough to cause power outages.
I got the second part.
JD climbed back into bed and went to sleep, so I thought the weather must be pretty bad. And I totally fell for it. My sleepy brain said "JD not at work = I can sleep in." As far as I can tell THIS IS NEVER TRUE. But I am an idiot when I am sleepy. A happy idiot, though.
Once it got kind of light out I stumbled downstairs and checked my mail. Work was a code yellow, which meant a two hour delay. Most of which I slept through. I thought about just staying home and telecommuting. The thing about that? Boring. I don't always love working, but I like it more than sitting in the house by myself.
Because I'm now married, I at least didn't have to go out and put salt on the ice. (What? Why'd you think I got married?) And JD didn't kill himself doing it so yay! After it had a few minutes to work, I put on my yaktrax and headed out to deice the car. It was about a quarter of an inch thick, which isn't too shabby if you ask me. It called for advanced ice removal methods.
I frankly have no idea how every body else deals with thick ice, but this is what I do. I use the corner of the blade to score a square pattern all across the ice. Then I whack an individual square a few times. Ice breaks out of that square, and from there I can get the blade under the ice to remove the rest of it. It fractures along my scored lines. On flexible areas like the hood of the car, I whack it to death. This doesn't work on rigid areas, but anywhere you can get a little flexion going, you can crack the ice.
I'm sure that was thrilling for you. But hey, it might be useful someday. Or not. At any rate it's faster than turning on the defroster and waiting for everything to melt.
When I got to work, BTW, the sidewalk was totally freaking iced over. I was still wearing yaktrax so I was fine, but I worried about others. We have some fairly elderly scientists in the building. What were they thinking when they told people it was okay to come in to work?
What else happened today: got my mouth cemented back together, had my spine straightened, found out somebody has been throwing food to my dog.
A general announcement: If you have been feeding my dog without my permission, I am going to hurt you.
JD found her in the back yard chewing on the bone of some unfortunate creature that had been butchered. A largish creature. I am so pissed off. She's been eating (as far as I knew) only every other day, and she's been puking and having a rumbly stomach and just generally been worrying me. I have no idea what the hell she's been fed, though obviously it involved bones. Bones which could have punctured something vital inside of her and I would have had no idea why. Not to mention the special diet she's supposed to be on to prevent her from getting more kidney stones.
I'm composing a letter which I'm going to put into the mailboxes of anybody with an adjoining yard, and some other folks nearby who are in a position to toss things over the fence. I suspect it's the back fence or we'd have seen something. In my experience, asking people not to feed your animals doesn't work - people just get more surreptitious. But if I point out that it's been making her sick, maybe somebody will listen?
Now I'm suspicious of the UPS guy. Why does she like him so much anyway?
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