The Ice Man Cometh

It's a winter wonderland today in Central Illinois. It's not so much that it snowed for 24 hours, it more like "iced".

Desperate to prove that I'm either dumb, crazy, or as we New Yorkers say "fearless" (and also because I left my laptop at work and could not work from the apartment), I ventured out to work. The office is of course closed. It's a huge complex - and entirely deserted except for me and a few brave and cold security and groundskeepers. (I wish I could post a picture of it, but I have this feeling that if I posted an image of this place - under any weather conditions - heck if I say the name of the company on this blog - they'll first shoot me and then fire me.) Truth be told, it looks a lot like I'm in the movie Fargo right now...there's no one around, and you can't tell the Earth from the sky.

There's a picture here of my neighbor Shawna cleaning her car (mine is on the right). She and I worked out there for the better part of 1 hour making them cars road-worthy... There was literally a 2 inch coating of solid ice over everything, and we immediately discovered that our ice-scrapers and snow brushes were entirely useless...it was like using plastic against a brick wall. This storm meant serious business.

So we were actually out there cleaning the cars with HAMMERS. Sadly, my mine took quite the beating - and didn't make it. Over the course of my wanderings in these last 5 years, I have spent entire winters commuting every week to some notoriously cold places - and I've experienced some serious winter weather. There was Sioux Falls and Minneapolis (yes that one's hard to forget: 36 straight days below zero...I remember the morning radio DJ announcing excitedly "Folks we're having a heat wave! It's 16 degrees warmer today than it was yesterday! But it is still below zero."), Toronto, Boston, and Chicago - and in all these places, I have never EVER needed to resort to "man-tools" in order to clean off a car before (and I've never broken anything either). Those big cold cities are nothin'! Bloomington has now won an extra special place in this road warrior's heart.