Iced in!

[ellenmillion]

It is very odd to hear rain on the roof in February. Very odd, and very disturbing. We were iced in this weekend, no way were we driving to town unless it was an emergency. (It nearly was… we were dangerously low on toilet paper!) We got pretty creative with the food we had left.

So I drew, a little, and wished I had paints. Watched Planet of the Apes, and a few episodes of Sex and the City. (Hilarious show… I'm really glad Matt got it in on DVD.) Sunday there was a lot of Sci Fi television (very cool!) and the Simpsons.

Had to be at work at 6 this morning. Blech. Driving in was very hairy. Trying to walk up our driveway was worse. Very, very, very slippery. Schools were closed today. If there hadn't been a project that needed to be out today, I would have played hooky. As it was, the script I wrote worked flawlessly, and a monkey could have run it, so I didn't actually need to be here.

Writing a terribly, horribly sad Kadanzer story… good stuff, but depressing. Ought to be writing something less far-off in the timeline. Ought to be plotting for Grindstone, but I'm not. I did put together an outline for the Jenny/Bjorn stuff, though, so I'll have a jumping off point, if that's what I decide to do. Maybe I should be digging up that darn Creative Sparks article Ciri and I started eons ago. Gah…

Two power outages already today. I expect more. Thank heavens for battery backups. And there was an 11-car pile up near Eielson. (A four-car pile-up is front-page news around here, mind you.) I saw at least eight places that cars had been in the ditch when we were driving in this morning. Ugly, ugly weather.

Comments

[mirar.livejournal.com]

That icy? I wouldn't have thought ice would stop Alaska...

Don't you use studded tyres? And sand the streets and stuff?

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

It's the temperature that's killing us... our roads and driveways usually have hard-pack - several inches of packed snow and ice. Most winters, that hard-pack is always frozen. It gets slippery at intersections where cars are idling and dripping condensed vapor, but most of the road is just ice. I say *just* ice because it's so cold that it's not slippery. Ice is most slippery near freezing, because the weight of a car (pressure, more accurately) causes it to turn into liquid, so that you're actually driving on water on top of ice. That's what's really slippery. Most of our winters are so cold that even the weight of a car won't cause that water layer. Some winters are cold enough you can't even iceskate.

They've gravelled the intersections, at least, and most of the roads in town, but there are a lot of ungravelled roads still, and of course, our driveway. We don't have studs this year (we've got the chains in the car, just in case), but we do have really grippy ice tires, and we didn't scoot around too much on the drive in. It was white-knuckle, and we watched other people sliding out of their lanes, but we have a pretty good car for ice handling. (All wheel-drive rocks) I was mostly scared of other cars... not everyone has good tires or good cars because usually you can get away without the expense if you live right in town.

[mirar.livejournal.com]

Mm, packed snow roads. Those are nice.

We get a lot of ice during the winter, and black ice as well. The temperature regularly goes above zero (°C) and back down to freezing. I guess you get used to it. :)

I got some studded winter tyres to the previous winter, because we simply have too much of that warm kind of ice up here. I did a full 360° in 80kph (50mph) on some really slippery ice...

AWD is great, I agree. :-)
The only issue I have is that the car is heavy, so it's a bugger to stop quickly. (2600kg)