Wheels Down

I left work early this evening. It was snowing heavily, I had finished with a project, and it was a good time to go.

There were light flurries in the morning when I left for work. Nothing that amounted to much. At lunchtime, even though it was forty degrees, the snow was heavier. Mainly, though, it was a wet annoyance that didn’t even stop me from replacing the headlight bulb in my Beetle (coincidentally, two years to the day after I replaced the same bulb).

Throughout the afternoon, though, the snowfall increased, and some colleagues who live in Pennsylvania said they were leaving early when they had the chance.

I could have left at any time. My critical tasks, which related to an annual catalog, I wrapped up shortly after lunch, but I had some modifications I wanted to make to some of my custom VBA macros for Word and Excel that I simply had not been able to get to, and I worked through the list of changes I’d compiled.

Done, I left at quarter to five. I wanted to get as much of the trip home done before nightfall as possible.

The drive home was fine. Yes, the snowfall was heavy at times. But the roads were merely wet, and the secondaries in Pennsylvania were in better shape than I expected. (The worst road, frankly, was Leader Heights Road, which crosses from 83 to Queen Street.) Even the back roads I take between Queen Street and my apartment complex were clear and, at most, a little slushy.

The parking lot to my complex was, of course, a disaster. There was about two inches of snow on top of icy slush, and the Beetle went into a skid, then a counter-skid, as I turned off of Walnut Street into the parking lot.

The snow stopped about forty-five minutes after I got home. I even shoveled my sidewalk in the evening’s twilight.

It will be interesting to see the parking lot’s condition in the morning, after tonight’s intense cold (though mild compared to the Midwest’s polar vortex, which brought temperatures colder than Antarctica). I expect a sheet of ice.

And I suspect that staying under the covers tomorrow morning will be very tempting. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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