gotta love winter in Chicago

It seems to me that the past tense of the word "snow" should be "snew." Blow -> blew, grow -> grew, so why not snow -> snew?

Anyway, yesterday it snew quite a bit. After work, I left the parking lot at 4:30, and arrived home ... at 9:00. A few minutes after, actually, since I had to park a couple blocks away. It took me 2 1/2 hours just to go the ten miles to the Des Plaines Oasis, where I stopped to grab a slice of pizza and take a little breather. So glad I did, too, because the rest of the way after that was much easier. So if you subtract the half-hour or so that I spent at the Oasis, it took me 4 hours to make a trip that should have taken about an hour. FOUR HOURS!! It's those storms that begin mid-afternoon that really kill ya. The trucks don't have time to get out there and make any headway with the plowing before it's suddenly rush hour and there's nothing they can do anyway. On my way home I saw a grand total of 1 truck on the road ... and it was plowing the shoulder.

a gripey morning

This morning I was totally frustrated with the world. Well, with my very small world, anyway. It all started when I couldn't get up the hill ...

(This is the part where everything gets all fuzzy and we flash back to earlier today, with my voice narrating in the background. After a short musical interlude of course.)

The Ravenswood tracks go right through my neighborhood, so all of the E/W streets have to pass under them, including the side street that I take just about every day while going to work. Since Ravenswood Ave. follows the tracks, in some parts it is divided into a lane on each side. Where this happens, the cross-streets usually have a stop sign on either side of the underpass. This is the case on my normally trusty route to work. Well. The genius politicians in my dear city decided that this year they weren't going to salt the side streets in order to save money. (Can you see where this is going?) Having had a bit of weather over the last few days, the ice is beginning to build up. When you're driving on a flat surface, this is tolerable. However, the road slopes downward to go under the Ravenswood tracks, and back up to go back out. And I believe I mentioned the stop signs? The first one, not a problem. It's the one on the way back up that's the killer. If there's no traffic, I can safely roll through it to keep up my momentum and get up the relatively-tiny-but-covered-in-ice hill. But today, of course, there was a car waiting to go through, so I had to come to a COMPLETE stop at the sign. And when I tried to get going again? Well, let's just say that the wheels were on my side but the rest of the car had other ideas. Namely, not moving. Luckily, there was nobody behind me, so I backed down under the tracks again and tried to make it up with a "running start." It took three attempts at this before I finally made it through. Not a great start to the day. So. I think I'm going to be changing my route tomorrow.

Anyway, this got me thinking about why there's not enough money to salt properly, and where the money is going instead, and why they keep raising prices on things (Parking! Public transportation!) and yet we see little to no increase of service. Is it because of the recession? Is it because of the Olympic bid? Is it because of political corruption? Which, of course, opened up another can of thought-worms. I wasn't able to listen to any radio station this morning without hearing about how Illinois is by far the most corrupt state, according to the FBI, and how our dear governor is a sociopathic asshat. It all just made me want to move, but not enough to make me, you know, actually MOVE. I just wanted to. And I was grumpy. And now I'm grumbling to you about it because you're a good listener.

I know all of this is a pretty lengthy way of saying winter sucks, and politicians suck, and recession sucks. But hey, you asked. Oh wait ...

car and cold

This winter has been nasty. Snow and cold and ice and more snow. Oh, and the flood that killed my car. That sucked pretty bad, too.

So, things had been going okay until about 2 1/2 weeks ago when a water main broke near my apartment, and caused flooding in the streets. This flooding was so bad that it caused a large portion of the street to collapse. It was also so bad that the water reached my car, parked about a half a block away, and rose to a level where it seeped into the interior of the car. Oh yeah, then it froze. I spent that whole day trying to get my car towed out of the mess that was my neighborhood before the whole thing turned into a giant block of ice. I didn't succeed until 7 p.m. that night, and the car was a total loss anyway. Bummer.

The next couple of days I took the train to work, which worked out okay, except I was damn depressed about my car. Plus, I had places I needed to go that weekend and no way to get there. That Thursday my Dad called me and told me he'd loan me his car so I could get around over the weekend (Love him!!). I told him I would give it back to him on Sunday, or whenever he needed it. It ended up that he didn't need it at all that next week, so I kept it and drove it to work every day. The following Thursday (after I'd had the car for a week), I had made plans to go to the parents' so my Mom and I could watch the "Lost" season premiere. Dad said that the next day, he and Mom would come out to my place of work to pick up the car, and I could take the train home from there. Well, due to the snowstorm forecast on Thursday night, I decided it would be in my best interest to spend the night at my parents' house. So I did. And I drove in to work the next day from there. But because of all the snow, my Dad didn't want to drive all the way to my work to get the car again, so he said I could keep it a while longer. Awesome!

The weather has only gotten worse. On Super Bowl Sunday, it snowed some more, and my friend and I got made fun of at the bar because we went to the window to check out the snow. Apparently some dude thought it was funny to assume we'd never seen snow before, or were not native to Chicago and had no idea it snowed here. In reality, we were gauging the amount of snow and whether it would be better for my friend to leave early (she'd driven) than stay for the whole game. 'Cuz you see, having lived in the Midwest our whole lives, we're smart enough to know to be aware of the weather conditions when we're driving somewhere. That guy was a prick.

This past Tuesday/Wednesday actually were prime examples of that need to be aware of the weather. We were expecting ANOTHER huge storm, with snow and rain and sleet and every other form of precipitation imagineable. Tuesday night I went home, half expecting to not come in at all the next day (or if I was feeling ambitious, I'd take the train). But when I woke up Wednesday, it was only raining. Where was this mythical storm? So I drove. And that was stupid. The weather worsened as I neared work, and this only put me on edge all morning. I knew it was going to get worse before it got better, and I would much rather be stuck at home than stuck at work. I ended up leaving half-way through the day, and I am super glad I did, because the snow was getting bad out in the burbs, and as I got into the city, the rainy "wintery mix" was turning to humongous snowchunks plummeting from the sky. I watched out my living room window as the snow continued to fall and the roads got worse and worse. I was happy with my decision to leave early, and it turns out I didn't miss all that much at work anyway.

But this morning, I started to think I really wouldn't mind being without a car for a while. I was giving my friend a ride to work (thank god) and when we attmpted to get into the car, we failed miserably. All 4 of the doors were frozen shut. After about 30 minutes of pushing and pulling and punching and slamming and trying to think of hot things we could use to melt the ice, we finally made a breakthrough. Literally. I threatened my friend that I was going to pour his hot coffee on the frozen door, and that was all the motivation he needed to finally pry the door open. You might be wondering why I didn't just give up and take the train. Well, that really wasn't an option today because once again, I am going out to my parents' house after work to return the car to my Dad. If I showed up without it, that might be a little odd. Not to mention, how would I get there?

So anyway, it's still cold and snowy and icy outside, but it's actually not as cold as it has been the past few winters (knock on wood). And as of tonight, I will be officially carless. Not that the one has to do with the other, but, well, in my mind, "the winter" and "the car" are now inextricably linked.