Tuesday morning Tessa (my elderly Great Dane) woke me up at 5:00am to go outside and (of course) EAT!! When I opened the door we were bombarded with tiny icicles hurling themselves at us at lightning speed. It was BAD out there. The wind was HOWLING!!! So what started accumulating on the ground and the roads, was ice. Millions of little chunks of ice that melded together to make our lives miserable.
Winter in Dallas isn’t really like winter at all. I mean, when you can do your Christmas shopping in a tee shirt and shorts, it’s really not winter. I’m from Minnesota, OK? Where winter really IS winter. The only time Dallas really feels like winter is during an ice storm, and I will admit that my Minnesota driving experience doesn’t help me there at all. I can drive on snow – I know how to do that – how to put the car in low and NOT spin your tires. You know, all the standard common sense stuff. But there really isn’t much you can do on ice.
I HAD to drive to my part time (once a week) job Tues night, and even though I’m only a few minutes away, it was a scary proposition. The streets were just ice. Might as well have been a skating rink. So I started braking early when coming to a stop light. My disk brakes went into overtime. Sliding, sliding, sliding, and finally coming to a stop. Then when the light turned green there was still no guarantee that someone wouldn’t t-bone you because they couldn’t stop for THEIR red light.!!!! Like I said – SCARY!! Luckily there weren’t that many cars on the road.
The media always amazes me during these weather outbreaks. It’s like they are foaming at the mouth for some juicy weather disaster.
Today is day 3 of the storm. Actually it only stormed once, and the ice that is on the road now is the same ice that’s been there since early Tues a.m. There is ABSOLUTELY nothing new happening right now, weather wise. And yet, the media breaks into my favorite programs every 10 minutes to show us pictures of 18 wheelers stuck on bridges, cars sliding into each other, folks a little short of grey matter standing behind pickups and jeeps – trying to PUSH them on the ice. Now there’s a good idea!
REALLY???? Are you SO desperate for news that we must drag this out for days on end??? I haven’t even been able to get any national weather (except for the ½ hour a day that the national news is on). No Early Show – just local weather. More and More and MORE local weather.
The true irony of the last few days is that Dallas is hosting the Superbowl this weekend. All of the football fan super-money that was supposed to be flowing into Dallas is being hijacked by the ice storm.
I guess God does have a sense of humor after all.
