Dear mom: call FEMA
The weather here really only got worse. First, I woke up Friday morning to discover that my clock wasn’t on and that we’d lost power. It was at this point that I assumed we had class cancelled by the University administration.
So, at this point I decided to take a look outside. Here’s the back of our house as seen from the garage. There was about six inches or more of snow piled up.
Of course, I also began to realize a few problems. First of all, a lot of snow had piled up in our massively long driveway. After checking the house’s basement and garage, I also realized that we lacked a shovel. And, further complicating the matter was the fact that I couldn’t even drive to the store to purchase one. Why? Because our cars were located in the garage (after our little freezing incident) and the garage was controlled by a automatic, electrical door-opening system, which was not working because of the power outage.
Eventually, I was able to get a lift from a friend and escape the house for a while at the local coffee shop to warm up, surf the Internet and get some updates as to what was really going on locally in terms of the weather. On the drive there, I snapped these photos of the a second tree limb that had fallen in our street, blocking half of the road and the lousy road conditions in the downtown area.
However, I must say that we were rather fortunate. Our power came back on around 7 p.m., which meant that my bird wasn’t going to freeze to death and that I’d be able to use the lightswitch again and get my car out. Unfortunately, the cable was out along with the Internet.
Saturday proved to be better in terms of road conditions, but most of the road had turned to ice down here. After driving to a friend’s house for the night and parking my car outside, Mother Nature still showed how bitter she was. When I went to leave for the night, I discovered that the locks had frozen to my car. I couldn’t even open the trunk. This left me with the fun option of walking more than a mile back home and now more than ever I’m intimately a cheerleader of the concept “dress for the weather.”
Get my locks unfrozen proved to be another fun adventure today as my roommate and I drove around Springfield Sunday looking for lock de-icer, which is a lot harder to find than you might imagine. For the record, it can be found at Wal-Mart in the automotive department sitting on the counter where the key duplicator is located. I picked up two.
This stuff works like a charm. It instantly de-iced the lock and now my car sits safely back in the garage. I’m keeping the other bottle in my coat, just in case this happens again.
In other news, we still can’t find a shovel and I borrowed one from the next-door neighbor. Everyone is sold out of them it seems. I halfway considered buying bottles of rubbing alcohol and a pack of matches, but decided that it might violate my lease. I’m guessing that retail stores will have shovels in stock about a week from now, but knowing my luck I’ll buy one and it’ll never snow again the rest of winter.
So, that’s what the weather is like in Springfield, Ill. Lousy, cold, icy and bitter as hell.
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