Winter Wonderland ??

We're very snowy here in Northern Michigan. We easily have over a foot of snow blanketing our deck. More snow falls each day, and the 10 day forecast shows snow every day. Our usual daily snowfall varies from 1-3 inches and seems quite manageable to me, who merely watches from the window. Our snow is white, beautiful and fluffy, and I hear it's great for skiing.

However - the East Coast has been getting gigantic snow storms this winter. They say that 19 inches of snow fell yesterday in Central Park!

At first Jana reported a Winter Wonderland in D.C. - but then things got really bad - here's the email from her that was waiting for us this morning:

On the 4:00 news broadcast yesterday, the VDOT lady said, if you are in DC and you haven't left your office, don't. Just stay there, don't add to the number of cars on the road.

The anchor said, what do you expect them to do? VDOT lady said, go have dinner, get a hotel room if you can.

The anchor was gobsmacked -- that was unprecedented advice.

I passed it along to a friend on IM, he said, pah, I only have a few miles, I will be fine. He was not yet home by 10 PM. Dork.

Now there are power outages all over (not here, I have never, knock wood, lost power here), so the traffic lights are out and the slush on the streets has frozen. It's anarchy. And supposedly there are still people stuck on GW parkway, who spent the night there.

The news keeps repeating phone numbers to call if you had to abandon your car -- apparently streets all over md, va and dc are just littered with abandoned cars that have to be towed before the plows can be effective, but the tow trucks can't get there because the streets aren't plowed.

Apparently the presidential motorcade even got stuck in traffic! He cut his visit to Wisconsin short, but it was already storming when AF1 landed, and the helicopters couldn't fly. So they joined the gridlock and got back to the white house a few hours later. (Luckily, the president did not have to relieve himself by the side of the road ;)

Sad -- a tree fell on a car at about 6:30 last nite killing a woman. By the 11:00 news broadcast, police and emergency vehicles had still not been able to make it to the scene. She just had to just sit there and be dead all that time :(

Now, as for this snow -- it was heavy and wet and fell fast. Really heavy. It was like falling slush, and it accumulated fast into inches and inches of slush. hard to say how many inches because it didn't stack up all fluffy, it sludged into the existing slush. But right now I have about 6 inches (of crusty half-frozen slush).

This morning after gym we had breakfast with some geocachers from Indiana - two women and 2 kids, Joe and Kacey. We had a really good time talking to them - Vonnie is the real geocacher of the crew - and we spent about 2 hours swapping tall tales.