{"id":31761,"date":"2019-01-29T19:58:08","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T00:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31761"},"modified":"2019-01-29T19:58:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T00:58:16","slug":"wheels-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31761","title":{"rendered":"Wheels Down"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I left work early this evening.  It was snowing heavily, I had finished with a project, and it was a good time to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;t even stop me from replacing the headlight bulb in my Beetle (coincidentally, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=30727\">two years to the day after I replaced the same bulb<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-twitter aligncenter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">It&#39;s almost 40 degrees and snowing lightly, and I successfully changed my Beetle&#39;s driver&#39;s side headlight bulb in less than five minutes. And I&#39;m starting to have feeling in my fingertips again.<br><br>Better today than tomorrow or Thursday when it&#39;s OMG COLD!<\/p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/status\/1090314777723891713?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 29, 2019<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Throughout the afternoon, though, the snowfall increased, and some colleagues who live in Pennsylvania said they were leaving early when they had the chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;d compiled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Done, I left at quarter to five.  I wanted to get as much of the trip home done before nightfall as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The snow stopped about forty-five minutes after I got home.  I even shoveled my sidewalk in the evening&#8217;s twilight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It will be interesting to see the parking lot&#8217;s condition in the morning, after tonight&#8217;s intense cold (though mild compared to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/29\/us\/polar-vortex-extreme-cold-weather.html\">the Midwest&#8217;s polar vortex<\/a>, which brought temperatures colder than Antarctica).  I expect a sheet of ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I suspect that staying under the covers tomorrow morning will be <em>very<\/em> tempting. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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,<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=31761\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Wheels Down&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":31763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[3921,4726,938,363],"class_list":["post-31761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-pennsylvania","tag-polar-vortex","tag-vw-beetle","tag-weather","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}