aLightningbug

Some days, “I could get out and walk faster than this,” is just an expression–exaggeration uttered for dramatic effect to convey frustration over the lack of forward motion in a bad traffic situation. Often, people even add the word, “literally,” to bolster the dramatic effect. Most oft it feels like you could walk faster, but, in fact, at some point your car-driving self would pull ahead of your pedestrian self and might even smirk a little. Today is not one of those days.

I left my office at about 3:10 pm and it is now 5:57. My normal commute lasts about 20 minutes. There was no snow on my car when I left–just rain and pellets of frozen rain that had begun to enchrust my vehicle. The light shell was easy to brush away. Now I estimate there are a good three+ inches of heavy snow on top of my car. Traffic is at such a stand-still I was able to stop my engine and hop out to clear snow off the windows and lights without ever leaving the main thoroughfare. I’ve cleared my side-view mirror five times. The woman in the car in front of me has cleared her entire car twice. The road itself has somewhat less snow–certainly, less than it would have had, had there not been miles of nearly-stopped vehicles shielding it from the full on blizzard-like conditions. Hot engines melting copious little snowflakes before they could flutter to the ground. I have seen lightning twice (at least, I think it was lightning–either that or blown transformers) and the woman in front of me just got out and cleared her car for a third time. I fear I may run out of gas. I am STILL not home, but I am close now. Close enough to know with absolute certainty that I could, indeed, walk home faster than this. 6:09.

6:20 I pull into my garage. Home!

[Adding a footnote to this. While I was relatively stressed and actually shaking by the time I got home, sitting in traffic for so long gave me some time to do a little reading, blogging, and briefly chatting with my fellow traffic sufferers. It could have been worse. My short (in miles), but time consuming drive yielded a solid 4-5 inches of heavy snow on top of my car. But I would later discover that some folks in our area would take over 13 hours to get home. There were kids stuck in daycares most of the night as their parents trudged through the slow moving traffic to reach them. I have to say, I had it pretty darn good in comparison.]