Inclement Weather
Jan. 31, 2002
Last night we had the most interesting weather since I moved to Indiana. First, it snowed all day yesterday after 2 weeks of > 50 degree weather. We got a bout 4 inches. That wasn't so strange. We have had snow before. The interesting stuff happened over the night.
Sometime around 10pm, the snow turned to rain. Freezing rain. Instead of falling clumps of powdery white stuff, we got little BB-sized bits of ice falling from the sky. Freezing rain makes a noise like a pile of gravel being dumped into a metal tin. It doesn't damage anything like hail does, but it certainly isn't as pleasant as snow.
Then, the next morning, something I really didn't expect.
I walked out the door of my apartment building expecting to see the same sort of snow I saw the night before. And indeed, it looked the same. However, when I stepped into it, instead of a satisfying soft crunch, a got a loud *crack* and my foot nearly slipped out from under me. The snow had petrified!
Well, sort of. It was ice. All of it. The parking lot looked like an ice skating rink. About 1 and a half inches of ice covered the whole thing. And not just the ground. The mailboxes, the building, and the cars. Yep, the cars. My car was encased in a 1 inch thick shield of ice. Luckily, the keyhole had a less thin layer and I was able to penetrate it. After some pulling and nearly falling down, I managed to get the door open. I got out my ice scraper and went to work. Getting the ice of the windshield was pretty easy. Once I got an edge under it, it all came off in one big sheet. The side windows were more of a problem. I couldn't get under the ice, so I tried rolling down the windows. That worked. Instead of a glass window, I had an ice one. I took a swing and smashed right through it. Damn that was fun. Rolled the window back up and moved on to the next one.
When I got to work, I noticed that the trees were covered in as thick a sheet of ice as my car. I broke off an ice-encrusted berry just for the novelty and walked into the office. Finally, something completely outside of my experience. Indiana has finally proved itself to be a much different place to live.