blue on black

I was all looking forward to not having to do snow/car work this morning and I'll be damned if I didn't get stuck in the freakin' driveway. Austin drove the Camry up the hill for me yesterday when it was slushy but this morning at 5 was a different story. I had to get Shannah up out of the bed to push me with her Subaru and I wish I had been a fly on the wall with all that tire squealing and praying for traction. The Cadillac is still nose down in a mud puddle so I hope we don't need it anytime soon. I've been parking away from the entrances at work because I'm obedient like that (hush) and of course we don't have breakfast anymore and everybody wanted some biscuits so I headed out to my car for a run to the gas station and *bam* there I went on my ass on the ice, like really hard. That's my second fall for this particular 5 day period and third for the entire winter. My arm is killing me in a way that naproxen won't touch and I'm on a streak at work. TGIF means nothing to this old girl today.

Even the kids are bored and ready to go see their friends, kind of like they get during the month of July when the novelty has worn off and it's too hot to think about doing anything outside unless you have a pool. Bound for me, this has been the biggest ice storm in the history of our area and damn near shut the place down for about three days. Folks who didn't have a way to go were just screwed unless there was a taxi run by somebody who was equipped. It wasn't until I saw the pavement on day three under the bumpy slush tracks that we had made that I understood how really bad it was for a place that's not accustomed to dealing with that sort of thing. We ran out of salt, which wouldn't have helped anyway because the stuff was over 5 inches thick. I'm enough of a survivalist/conspiracy theorist to believe that the downfall of this country will be a collapse of the infrastructure that was so carefully built until money ran out was diverted to other "important" things like wars and CEO salaries.

My aunt is still in the ICU following hip surgery I presume. Another thing that really struck me about this week of dicey weather is how patient transfer is affected for area hospitals. EMS can't take a chance in iced over roads and the choppers aren't very safe either. When that happens it's hunker down and take care of the job at home. It's kind of ironic that she and Mo got stuck there which is where they used to live. Full circle ya'll.