(n)ice

The kids are sleeping, dreaming of God knows what...

...when they wake up they'll realize that one dream has come true. The ice/winter storm that hit last night was bad enough to close school.

It's currently 23^o in Rowlett. That's pretty cold for Texas. Add the freezing rain and sleet from last night and the streets, lawn, driveway, cars, house, everything are covered with a nice layer of ice.

There is just no way to drive on this stuff. It's worse than if we got two feet of snow. At least with snow, there is something for your tires to grip. With this ice, there's nothing. The cities here put down sand, but that just makes sure your car gets dirty before sliding into some immovable object.

Since I'm in Texas, I've always had the option to work from home (either at my discretion or full-time). Ice storms were always a good reason to do so, and I would, so I've never really had to drive in this stuff too much. Except once. We were coming home from Amarillo (where some of Angie's family is). We hit an ice storm and what should have taken at hour, maybe an hour and a half drive from Denton to Dallas took seven. It was a white knuckle drive in which I asked the kids to be silent so I could concentrate on the road. We had my Cherokee those days, and even in 4-wheel drive low gear, we couldn't go faster than a slow crawl the whole way. We past cars spinning left and spinning right. I still don't know how we ever got over the interchange bridge that connected 35E South and 635 East, but we did.

It would be nice to be a kid today, where driving isn't a concern - and where staving off boredom is.

SL