And Then It Snowed

[billroper]

Deciding that our VP was unlikely to arrive early enough that going to the Loop for meetings today would be useful, I went to the Westchester office this morning. Actually, I would have just stayed home and VPNed in from my work laptop, but it's been so long since I used it that I couldn't manage to get that to work.

See, catalana needed to get back to the train to Champaign and Erica Stormbringer had outdone herself with the snowstorm that arrived to herald her departure. The roads were covered with a mix of snow and slush that made me nervous. daisy_knotwise has a minivan with ABS. I drive a Ford Five Hundred with ABS, traction control, and AWD. I know which vehicle is going to be safer to drive in today's guck. Add to that the concept that an accident in the minivan will include Gretchen and Katie, while an accident in the sedan will include me (no slight to Erica, who finds herself in the hypothetical accident in either case) and the potential guilt load for not being the car to drop Erica at the train station this afternoon gets just a bit too large to put up with.

This is not to say that my sedan is accident-proof (or that I am, for that matter), but if you've taken all reasonable precautions, you've done the best you can under the circumstances. Given the four or five accidents that I saw on the Tri-State on the way to Westchester (at least one involving a minivan), I think it was the right decision.

I called Gretchen from work and filed the altered plan, then tried to get some work and meetings out of the way before heading back home for lunch. We went to Sweet Baby Ray's, where the staff was -- as usual! -- enchanted by Katie. Then I dropped Gretchen and Katie off and Erica and I headed for downtown.

Traffic on the inbound Kennedy was slow, but moved pretty well. I don't know why someone would be traveling in the left lane with their flashers on, but some drivers are happily a mystery to me. I dropped Erica off to catch her train with an hour to spare and headed home on the much slower outbound Kennedy.

When I got home, I checked in with Doug and found out that our VP hadn't been able to get into O'Hare, so the meetings scheduled for the rest of the week have been pushed off for at least two weeks. Overall, this is probably a good thing.

After dinner, I took the snowblower to the driveway where it did a fair job, although I had to use the shovel to break up some of the packed snow. There appears to have been another inch or so of snow that's fallen since, but that should be fairly easy to clear tomorrow.

I've also found that using the noise-canceling headphones and the new MP3 player while snowblowing the driveway makes it a much more pleasant experience. :)

And Erica reports that she made it back to Champaign without incident, which is good and pretty much what we expected based on the better weather south of here.

There will eventually be more comments from me on the con, but probably not until tomorrow.

Comments

[samwinolj.livejournal.com]

The snowblower actually worked for you? I watched two of my neighbors try theirs and give up. As best I could tell, the snow we had yesterday was made of depleted uranium, rather than water.

My back still hurts.

[billroper]

The snow was pretty ugly, I admit. I tried to kill my snowblower a couple of times by pushing it into drifts, but always managed to back it out before it choked.

On the other hand, this is a pretty good snowblower. :)

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

My electric snowblower went through the heavy snow and slush with no problem (what ended up coming out of the chute looked more like thick brown goop than snow, but the darn thing kept chugging along fine). The only thing I don't like about the electric is that I don't have a long enough extension cord (something easily fixed, but I have been too lazy to get my butt down to the hardware store to rectify the situation). What I really wish I could find is a self-retracting extension cord widget (that would handle a 100' power cord) to mount near the garage door - that way I wouldn't have to worry about cutting/tripping over the cord, and it would be very easy to reel back in.