A Long, Long Winter
2-5-10
It’s becoming and remaining a very vile winter. Stuck in the south, surrounded by all of these irritating garbled accents, I sit here and try to keep myself getting paid. A cesspool of violent, vocal purgatory oozing through the environment makes it almost impossible to think straight.
It could be worse, I could have a job where I could break my back and kill my legs rather than this one where I risk heart attack from stress and never being able to use my hands/wrists/arms ever again.
Complain, complain…this brings me back to the winter. Our third snow is happening right now and it’s downright depressing.
When the first snow happened, I think I was working (as always). I braced myself for driving home and, when I got out, backed out very slowly. The small hill out of the back of the parking lot looked fine. No one was around and, after watching a little bit, another vehicle drove up it with no problem. I figured I’d give it a shot. So I got on the driveway and sped up to give myself the speed before I hit the incline. It worked out and I was up and over the hill in no time.
The thing I hadn’t thought about was that there were two speed bumps followed by a stop sign up ahead. The bumps were no problem, the stop sign was the culprit. Of course I had to slow down and come to a stop…on another smaller slope. I lost traction and gave up immediately. Luckily, no one was behind me at the time allowing me to back up and turn off into the neighboring drug store parking lot. This lot had another outlet that was all downhill and would drop me off on the highway.
I generally take the back “country roads” on the way home due to the traffic and immense built up feeling this city emanates, I’m on them enough as it is, but after that episode I opted to take the most travelled roads home as I figured they’d be the most cleared.
That’s when I discovered the south doesn’t touch their roads while it’s snowing. Everybody hides, all the stores start closing, then they don’t plow for two days.
The next night, I got stuck trying to get myself out of my own driveway. I never had a reason to notice, but MY driveway is on an upward slope towards the street. I guess I had noticed but it never caused a problem. A couple neighbors ran over to push and Tony came out to help. Good thing for all of that timing. I didn’t park in the driveway again until it was time to have off for a few days.
Mundane time passed for a while and the snow fully melted away. It got surprisingly nice out for a week or more. Then our next snow came.
This time, I knew not to park in my driveway. And I woke up an extra hour before work to make sure the van could get dislodged. The snow lasted nearly two days. The roads were barren and blanketed and, of course, my job makes it mandatory to come to work, even in these conditions. I found it surprising that not a single plow truck was out, and not one ounce of salt was put out to make driving easier. No wonder the southern population panics when it snows, no one does anything about it. By the morning, they had declared a state of emergency. No one was allowed out unless it was necessity.
I never thought we’d encounter this kind of weather in North Carolina. The past four years we merely had dustings. If they laid, they were nothing more than an inch or two of snow in the grass, always melting within the next cycle of daylight. Cold, but not that windy. This year, it’s been like Pennsylvania. We’re in our third storm and I’m wondering if this has become the norm. So much for the global warming hoax the government has been capitalising on.
I do hate the cold with a passion.
