mattbelcher.com

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.
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<br>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.
<br>Then, the next morning, something I really didn't expect.
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<br>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!
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<br>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.
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<br>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.