Ice storms

  • Our weather made a few head­lines, and a friend of ours from Cal­i­for­nia called up to say, “What in the world is an ice storm?”

    Well, the short­est answer is that it’s some­thing that every­one would be bet­ter off without.

    It made our back­yard look like this:

    is-back-yard.jpg

    And the thing to notice is that the twig at the left of the pic­ture is coated about 1/2″ thick all around with ice. That’s the part of it that’s hard to catch on a cam­era. All the twigs are 1/2″ thick with ice. And so are the branches, the phone wires, the gutters, …

    Heck, so is my cute lit­tle lawn orna­ment with the danc­ing frogs. They look like the White Witch cast a spell on them.

    is-frogs.jpg

    And while there’s some­thing a lit­tle fas­ci­nat­ing about how things look, the ice storms are nasty, nasty things to drive in. The sleety, gloppy ice is too hard for the wind­shield wipers and wiper fluid to keep up with, and so you have a smaller and smaller win­dow to look out of as you go on. And when you just plain can’t see, you get out and de-ice the car as much as you can, then get back in and drive as fast as you can before it ices up again. But dri­ving as fast as you can still isn’t all that fast, because the road is also coated with ice and the brakes have a very hard time get­ting any trac­tion. So any kind of incline is a bit of a trial.

    Just stay­ing put and turn­ing up the heat until it’s safe to go out is the best ploy, but that assumes that you have elec­tric­ity. Because the ice gets on every­thing and weighs more than snow, an ice storm is much more likely to knock out the power just when you need it the most.

    Thank good­ness, we look like we’ve made it through this one. The sun finally came out today and the tem­per­a­tures are above freez­ing. So now there’s the sound of break­ing ice going on every­where as lit­tle pieces and big ones break loose and tum­ble from every branch and wire.

    When we came out to the Mid­west, some­one told us that the thing to know is that win­ter usu­ally makes one or two seri­ous attempts to kill you.

    Looks like we’ve made it through one of those attempts.

    is1.jpg

    Related posts:

    1. Vivaldi weather
    2. Extremely inter­est­ing weather
    3. Cold as a bat’s underpants
    4. My favorite tortellini soup
    5. Finally! A nice day in August

    December 13th, 2007 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Cather­ine K. 12.13.2007

    Oh my! Thank God you made it through this storm, and will through the oth­ers to come as well!

  • Ron

    “When we came out to the Mid­west, some­one told us that the thing to know is that win­ter usu­ally makes one or two seri­ous attempts to kill you.”

    LOL! That’s going into my quo­ta­tions database.

  • Grace

    It turned out to be one of the truest things we heard. And actu­ally, it’s not like the earth­quakes, Santa Ana winds, smog alerts and wild­fires in SoCal don’t have that same feel to them, but then they’re not all that sea­sonal, because the whole idea of sea­sons in that region is sort of hazy.

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