Well, no ice yet (in fact I am still just getting rain), but they are warning that tonight and tomorrow we could get ice accumulations up to an inch.

Now, even accounting for journalistic hyperbole, I am officially freaked out.

Half-an-inch of ice will bring down power lines and big tree branches. An inch (if by some bizarre situation they are right) will bring down ENTIRE TREES.

The reason I am freaked is that I have a 100+ year old pecan tree right up next to my house. Branches extend over my roof (and worse, over the roof of the house next door, which is owned by a person who is very very picky and who once told me she wanted me to cut the tree down because she thought it was endangering her rental property).

I'm also kind of freaked because back in 2000, we had an ice storm here (mostly further southeast of us and some of the bad stuff happened while I was on Christmas break and was at my parents' house) and there were people who didn't get their power back for more than a week.

Holy rotten freezers, Batman! (Though to be honest, I'm more concerned with "what do I do if I can't heat my house? How do I live?" I know if things get really really bad they will be opening shelters, but...I kind of think that would be Hell on Earth for me - lots of people crowded all around, noise, enforced contact (and probably conversation) with people I don't know well....I'd probably volunteer to distribute blankets or read stories to the little kids or something just to be DOING something rather than sit there and have to listen to someone else worry about their house or have them complain about how the government could have and should have prevented this or something...)

So anyway. If I don't post for any length of time following this, it's that we got the ice, there's no power, and I may be clinging desperately to shards of my sanity as four year olds run screaming around the cot I have been assigned and the woman next to me wants to tell me all about Amway...

(Again: that same psychologist who told me I was a "high arousal person" also told me I had the tendency to "awfulize." Now, I hate those kind of invented words that psychologists use to explain things to lay people [did he think I wouldn't have understood the phrase, "You tend to believe the worst-case scenario will happen"? I mean, I was in college at the time and he knew I was.... But anyway, yeah, I do awfulize. I claim it as a defense mechanism: when you have anticipated the worst possible situation, when something less-bad than the worst happens, you're actually happy and grateful rather than being upset or angry)