Earthmovers and Sandcastles

It is disgusting outside, or at least it was the last time I bothered to look out there.

Snow is nice. I can handle snow. That stuff that was out there this morning? Not snow. It rained and spit “wintry mix” all last night, and even though it looked deceptively okay when I glanced out the window, the “bare pavement” was actually covered with a thin, almost invisible, layer of wet slush that made everything slick and dangerous. And did I mention wet?

Maybe it’s that I got a bad taste in my mouth for it almost immediately, when I made the horrible decision to go for an outdoor run instead of hitting the treadmill for a second day in a row. I actually remarked on Twitter this morning something to the effect of, “I’ve got gear to run in it, but it’ll be a mighty cold rain.” The finely misting rain actually wasn’t the issue; it was that with the very first invisible puddle I hit, my shoes were penetrated by icy water, soaking my socks and making my toes want to give up and fall off. I actually screamed aloud; nobody heard, because nobody else was idiot enough to be out there in that nastiness.

I did ten miles of unadulterated torture and agony. The worst part came when the rain-turned-snow decided to morph into little pellets of sleet. I was sure that my face would be bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts by the time I got home.

Then I had to drive in it. Do they make YakTrax for vehicles? I had much better traction running than the van did; it was sliding all over the road, and my brakes kept thump-thump-THUMPing at me with their antilock assistance at nearly every intersection, no matter how slowly I approached them or how soon I tried to stop. I was far from the only scared driver, too.

Back home, I rechecked the weather site. “Snow is heavy due to high moisture content and will be difficult to move.” Well, great. I went out and “pre-shoveled” this evening, and gross doesn’t begin to describe it. I might as well have been trying to lift Gabe on the end of the shovel for how it felt as I hefted load after load of slush off the sidewalk. All the while, it kept falling around me, covering the areas I’d just cleared.

Nasty. Just nasty. At least it’s supposed to get up into the forties, with more rain, this weekend, so much of it should disappear…except that on Monday, it’s calling for continued rain and high temps that are going to drop into the teens with snow by nightfall. Looks like we’ll get to do this all over again! Ugh!

Whine, whine, whine. Can’t believe I’m saying it, but…can’t we please just have normal snow? I’d rather it stay in the freezing temps if we could just skip the rain until spring, thanks so much.

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