Snow day follies

* The local news was warning people not to try ice fishing on frozen farm ponds. (Sadly, a six year old boy in Tulsa apparently slid down an embankment into a pond and died. It doesn't look like he was intentionally going on the ice; it was an accident).

* Saw a guy driving way too fast and oversteering and sliding all over the road. I thought he was just an idiot who didn't know how to drive on ice but when I saw my mail carrier and remarked on it to her and said, "He didn't know what he was doing" she said, "I think he was. He was being a butt." (I like my mail carrier)

* I went out and tried first to break a path for meltwater so it wouldn't pool at the base of my drive and form a sheet of ice (I was only partly successful; we have so-called "western drainage," which means very few storm-sewer inlets, so water doesn't really have a good place to go)

* Then, after learning campus WILL be open tomorrow. (Oh dear. I hope the "butt" I wrote about above isn't out when people are trying to get to campus), I decided to try to chip the ice away from at least the steepest part of my drive. Wow, that's hard work. (And I kept thinking: high blood pressure, how much more likely to have a heart attack are you? But then, I exercise regularly and eat carefully and have never had chest pain, so....) I got most of the slope cleared but gave up on doing any more. (the slope represents maybe four feet by seven feet). I do have a 20 lb. bag of kitty litter in my car in case....

* I "fell" twice while outside (even in tennis shoes; that's how slick it is). I put "fell" in quotation marks because both times were very slow-motion, "Oh, I'm losing my balance. Okay, what can I do to go down without hurting myself" moments. Once was when retrieving my roll cart - I just let it go back into the street and went down on one knee. The other time I just went down slowly onto my front and crawled back up the drive until I was where it was flat enough I could get back up.

*I'm going to take my hiking staff tomorrow because I expect the lots will be icy. (Update: a colleague just stopped by there and he said the lots were solid ice. Wow. I hope our health-care plan covers slip and fall....)

* I did some research-reading today and worked on the Big Purple Thing. It's getting close to done but I don't know whether to end it once it gets minimally "long enough" or to just keep going until I've used up nearly all the yarn.