Weather

I left work a little early yesterday due to sleet. Understand, dear readers, that I am not afraid of a little weather. I fear not snow, nor wind, nor dark of night. But the thought of sitting in my Civic on the side of the road in a sleetstorm with Spunkygirl (who, you might remember, is nearly two) while I watch a mammoth extended cab pickup skid into me in super slo-mo, well that's something that strikes fear in the very core of my being. So, I left early. It took me 10 minutes to travel the 1 mile to Spunkygirl. In that time, I saw three, that's three, different bigass pickups fishtail as their drivers attempted to accelerate on ice. I packed Spunkygirl into the car, said a prayer, and off we went into the sleet. Well, off we went onto the side road where no one would let me merge into the left lane so that I could merge onto the highway and go off into the sleet. Because, you know, it would be somewhat sacriligious to allow the spunky woman and spunky child into the little black car to move into the line from the daycare parking lot where said spunky females obviously had no option but to merge into the line because the parking lot is where it is and the line is where it is and one is right smack dab in the middle of the other. People, regardless of spunk level, cannot generally change the physics of reality no matter how much the pissy man in the turquoise El Camino lays on his horn. I did manage to merge with the help of signals and much waving and a very kind older man in an Oldsmobile. And then the sleet hit the fan. It was sleeting so hard that ice was forming on my window as I was driving. I turned my defroster on as hot and high as it could go. This tactic did stop the ice buildup on my windshield. It also singed off the top layer of my face and dried my eyeballs so badly that I might not be able to cry for another ten or twelve years. I set a median speed of around 35 mph, figuring that if I was passing the fools traveling 10 mph on the interstate and being passed by the fools traveling 70 mph in treacherous sleet that my middle-of-the-road approach could not possible be foolish. And I was right because Spunkygirl and I arrived home safely. When I pulled her out of her seat, she told me, "Oh." I couldn't have said it better myself.