It's been a while since the last blog entry. Not really for lack of things going on. More of a mix of just being busy and too lazy to blog. But here I sit in my layover hotel on Waikiki in Honolulu on a rather blah and rainy day so what better time to catch up on the blogging.
February was a good month schedule wise. I was able to trade most of my trips for London, my favorite layover. I was fortunate enough to also trade away my first trip, at the beginning of the month when we were scheduled to have a real cold snap and an ice storm. I thought I had dodged a bullet, or so I thought.
The weather event was slated to hit Tuesday in the early hours of the morning. Monday evening you would have thought nuclear war had been declared. Not being a native of Texas, I have never understood people's fascination with weather events. But sure enough, Monday night the stores were jammed with shoppers, there were long queues for gasoline. Folks were preparing for the impending storm. I tried to go out around 6pm or so and it was so busy, I ended up going out later that night. While at the grocery store, the cashier was hoping her Economics class would be cancelled at the University the next day, but I did not think it was going to be that bad. Armed with my provisions, I headed home just as the rain started coming down.
The next morning I woke up to this...
Overnight the freezing rain had turned into ice. There was very little snow. I had my dog Gretchen and my parent's dog Beau with me and they were not real thrilled with the outside conditions. We basically spent the next few days indoors being very still. They got into a habit of just going to the bathroom twice or three times a day. In fact, Beau would growl at me every time I picked him up to go outside. I ate big breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (since there was nothing else to do) much to the detriment of my waistline. I watched so much of my DVR that I had no programs in my queue. It was a lonely few days because I did not leave the house. There was no school. Things were shut down. When I lived in Boston, no one would have given this weather the time of day, but it's different in Texas.
So Thursday evening rolls around. Things have started to melt off a bit. I am actually excited about going to work on Friday, just to get out of the house. Our local meteorologist, Dave Finfrock, tells us that we are due for a little snow on Thursday night/Friday morning, but I specifically remember him saying in the DFW area it would just be a "light dusting".
Around midnight I was just about to go to bed when my friend Michelle K. posts on her Facebook page that it is snowing like crazy. I check outside and sure enough things are already covered. But I still trusted Dave when he said it would be light so I thought nothing of it and went to be. Imagine my shock the next morning! The evidence is captured on camera below...
I think the official record for my part of town was about 8 inches but it felt like 2 feet. Of course I still had to go to London on Friday night, so I had the driving to deal with. I ended up leaving the house hours ahead of my flight so I would have enough time. I had already heard horror stories of coworkers so snowed or iced in they could not get out of the driveway, or their gates were frozen shut.
The roads were crazy but most people were taking it very slow. It took me about an hour to drive the 10 miles to the folk's house to drop the dogs off. One jack wagon in an F-150 was driving fast and furious. I'm sure he ended up in a ditch.
I did make it the airport just fine, although we left about 3 hour late because of a mechanical delay (nothing to do with the weather). When I returned home 48 hours later, it was all gone, melted off. Like it never even happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment