When I was living in Texas, I noticed that whenever we got hit by an ice storm (and it was usually ice rather than snow), people in more northern climates mocked us because it paralyzed the city for days. They didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t have the infrastructure for dealing with that kind of weather (and it wasn’t cost-effective to develop the infrastructure when it was something that happened once every few years) and that you really can’t do a lot about ice other than wait for it to melt.

Now that I live in a more northern place and in the mountains, I get snow more regularly, and they still shut down. They’re good about getting the streets plowed, but the school buses are too risky on the steep hills until the roads are truly clear. This weekend, though, we got a storm that was more like what Texas gets. It started as snow and turned into sleet. Now we have a crust of about 3 inches of sleet on top of about 4 inches of powdery snow, and the whole city has been shut down for three days. They can’t plow the ice (and broke some snowplows trying). They’re now going out with heavy construction equipment, the kind they use to break up asphalt to resurface roads, to break the ice up so the plows can then go through and move it out of the way. That’s slow going, so my little one-block side street that’s on the bottom of the priority list is still solid ice. One neighbor tried going up and down it with a snow blower, but that did no good.

To make matters worse, it’s getting single-digit cold at night, sunny and in the 20s (F) during the day, so the top layer is melting slightly while in the sun then freezing hard at night, so it’s like a skating rink. If you look at it, it looks like the kind of snow that looks like mounds of fluffy whipped cream, but I can walk across the top of it without leaving footprints. Well, I could on Monday before it slightly melted in the sunlight and refroze to be very slippery. Now I can’t walk on it. I was able to shovel a path to the street Monday by breaking through the top layer and flipping it to the side, but now that top layer is even harder and my shovel does nothing, so I can’t clear the driveway. I may get out the garden hoe to see what I can do today. I can’t do much at any one time because it’s very cold and my gloves aren’t up to the task. I have to come inside when my hands start hurting. I tried to buy some better insulated gloves last week before the storm, but they were clearing out their winter gear and setting out spring gardening stuff, so they didn’t have any heavy gloves that would fit me. I’m going to try knitting some mittens to wear over the gloves I have.

Once you get that top crust of ice off, the rest is light, powdery snow that’s easy to move. I’ve been able to clear much of the ice/sleet off my car, but the area around the car is still pretty solid, and there’s a wall of snow at the end of my driveway from when they tried to get ahead of the storm by plowing during it, which only made matters worse because it shoved the snow aside so the sleet was directly on the street. I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere anytime soon. Fortunately, I stocked up at the grocery store last week. If I do need something, my neighbor has chains on his car and has been able to get out, and he’s offered to pick up anything I need.

We had a storm kind of like this in Dallas in 2014, and we’ve been paralyzed here just as long as we were in Dallas. The bright side is that I haven’t had to worry about the electrical grid crashing the way it did a few years ago in Texas during a winter storm.

I’ve been able to keep up with writing in spite of the distractions. I should theoretically have more writing time because I can’t go anywhere, but my brain has other plans. I’m close to the end of the draft, though.