For the past few days, the weather has been absolutely beautiful. By the middle of last week, temperatures were climbing up to the 50s. By Friday, it was about 65 degrees, sunny, and clear. Although everyone was getting comfortable with the weather and going outside with light jackets or no jackets at all, the forecasters on the news kept warming us that things would change suddenly Sunday night and Monday morning. They weren't kidding!
Sunday was a pretty nice day. The temperature was about 45 degrees, but it was sunny and clear. I watched news that evening, and the forecasters were still warning that things were going to get bad. When I woke up this morning and looked out the window, the sidewalks looked wet, but it seemed like it was raining and not snowing. After taking my shower and making my breakfast, I turned on the morning news and they said that the temperature was about 25 degrees, but that temperatures would continue to drop significantly throughout the day.
I was ready to go at my usual time around 7:30, and as I stepped out of my apartment building, I almost wiped out and ate the sidewalk. The rain, or "freezing rain" as the news called it, had already left a layer of ice on the sidewalk. The parking lot was also extremely icy, and one of my really nice neighbors, who was walking outside at the same time with me, was nervously watching me as I penguin waddled across the parking lot. I'm sure he was afraid that I would go down.
When I safely made it to my car, I found a layer of ice covering my car and I had to really jerk on my door just to get it open. So, I started up my car, turned on all the window defrosters, and started to try to chip the ice from my windows. And I'm not exaggerating. There wasn't frost on my windows; it was ice, really thick ice. To make things worse, it was hard for me to brace myself and get some force behind the ice scraping, because the parking lot was so slippery. Every time I tried to scrap really hard, my feet would start to slide out from under me.
After chipping away for about 25 or 30 minutes, I was finally got to the point where I could start to drive away. Judging by the conditions of the sidewalk and parking lot, I assumed that the roads would also be slick, and I was right. The roads were extremely icy, and I clenched the steering wheel, and took it slow all the way to work. Fortunately everyone behind me and in front of me were also taking it slow. By the time I got to work, it started to snow and temperatures really started to drop. A lot of people who actually made it into the office took some work and went home early. I left the office at about 2:00 and was glad I did.
Right now it is about 3 degrees with a wind chill of -12. They say that the temperatures tonight will drop to -6 to -11 and the wind chill could be about -20. The local school districts are already closing the schools tomorrow, and our office is officially closed, too. Even though we had only about 4 inches of snow today, people are more worried about the frigid temperatures and extremely icy conditions. I'm really glad that I won't have to drive to work tomorrow!
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