Snow and ice, day 2.

After I shut the laptop down this morning, I looked out the window toward the back. The tree that has leaned all the time we've lived here, on my neighbor's property, is now mostly flat. I say mostly because about a quarter of it is standing right where it was - a separate trunk, I think, but it was still pretty dim when I saw it.

Snow and a bit of ice on the road, not bad, but there were ice patches all up I-5. (All between the lanes - too much traffic for within the lanes.) Lots of reports of problems, though, all sorts of nastily icy bridges and the like. I had no real trouble, a couple times when I got on surface streets near work I was driving on ice, but I knew it and it was not bad - not heavy traffic, no trouble keeping control either.

The only bad part was coming up to the light where I needed to turn left and stopping there, and I did not slip at all, I was just worried because I could not tell if some areas were water or ice. So I treated them all like ice and I don't think they were. Better than assuming the opposite and being wrong.

At least one person has emailed that he will not be in to work today, or at least not until later, because there is an extremely large puddle that has frozen into sheet ice right outside one of the parking areas where he lives. The one he happens to use. He watched a truck in 4-wheel-drive go maybe 5 mph max over it, with the tires spinning much faster, and figured it was not a good idea....

I would agree! It doesn't look too bad, though. The forecasters are changing their predictions again, so I will just wait and see what the weather does next. The expected high has not dropped, though, only the low has. So I imagine the afternoon will still be fine. They can't make their minds up on whether it will snow down to our level or not tonight, though. They seem pretty confident that my parents will have snow, at least based on elevation and such. :)

Also, why is it that they run the furnace such that this building is always chilly in the morning in weather like this, and yet by about 2 in the afternoon you're sweltering even if it does look grim out there? Sigh.

Yes, I'm sure you're all sick of the weather updates.

The drive home was clear. They are still not making their minds up about what it is going to do where we are. At the elevation my parents are at, as pheon posts, it's looking like they'll get enough to be worth taking note of.

Note that when I say the drive home was clear, I am being relative here. The slick spots were all in parking lots and driveways, or on the edge of the road, not where you were trying to drive. This is clear enough for me.

If the pessimists are right then I will work from home tomorrow as the roads will be yucky. If the realists or optimists are right, I will go into the office. Either way, after that I have Thursday and Friday off. Which is good because the weathermen cannot make up their minds about those either.

It is pretty, really. And it's kind of funny how very chaotic a little bit of snow can make us. It seems less unusual to me because I grew up with it; we do not get snow often and most of the folks here either never knew or have forgotten how to drive in it. And our tendency to linger around thaw when we do get freezing weather means that it is actually pretty treacherous since it will often (as it did yesterday, bless it) melt just enough to refreeze into ice or an ice crust. Or sit as slush all day long....