Weather in the real world

Yesterday, my friends Chris, Heather, and I were the only ones braving the winter weather to do the regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration. That’s okay. We got LOTS of honks and I don’t think any of us caught pneumonia…
The weather was what forecasters describe as “a wintry mix.” There had been snow in the late morning, and by the afternoon it had turned to freezing rain. An ice storm was forecast for the evening…
In case you’re not familiar with “freezing rain”, here’s how it works. The air temp is always just at around freezing, having risen a tad from a long spell at sub-freezing. Rain falls. As it hits any objects– pine needles, utility wires, roofs, sidewalks, whatever– that is still at sub-freezing, it immediately freezes, causing a hard casing on tree boughs, pine needles (there’s a reason I mention them again), railings, sidewalks, etc. As the rain continues this casing gets thicker and thicker, or dangles down in the most amazing icicles, either way adding weight to said objects. If they are utility lines or pine boughs, they can rapidly become heavy, and break off and fall. A falling bough can of course also bring down some of the utility lines that loop along high above most of our streets here in C’ville.
As we stood there, of course it rained on us. There were very few pedestrians and relatively few drivers going past. The cars drove slowly along a nasty slushy roadway. One big city-run snow-plough came past and the driver gave us a great honk!
But of course as utility lines all over the city started snapping, there were fires and power outages in many places. Near where we stand is a fire station. The fire-trucks were called out no fewer than six times while we were there. And I have to confess we actually packed in our vigil quite a bit short of the normal 60 mins. duration.
Anyway, I drove Heather home through several dark, powerless neighborhoods. (She, Chris, and our friend Chip are three people who regularly come to the peace vigil by bike; but yesterday both she and Chris sensibly chose to get there by other means.) She and I did both have power in our homes, however. I had a nice warm dinner with Bill and my son Tar and settled down to plan for a nice evening’s blogging when–
You guessed. We lost power.
We lit the candles that we already had at hand. Bill and I played a few rounds of our favorite word games. Tar was in his room, I think working (by flashlight.) We all went to bed early. The power didn’t come back till around six hours later.
This morning, I ran a bunch of errands… sat down and researched and wrote a really long and informative JWN post about Australia… just about finished it… and then, I swear to God (or would, if I weren’t a Quaker) that I had even thought “Oh, I ought to save this” when I turned around and–
You guessed, the darned power went out again.
All that work lost.
Anyway, now I’m writing this on my laptop. He-he-he. It won’t get lost in a power-out his way, will it?
But here, for any of you who has had similar experiences, is the haiku I have taped up beside my desktop computer:

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Of course, I read that again this morning and said a long “Ommmm.” I guess writing “power-out” instead of “crash” would mean we’d lose the scanning there? But you lose the work you’ve done and failed to save just the same, in both events.
But at least a power-out has two huge advantages over a computer-linked “crash”:

(1) The power will come back on. You know that. You just need to wait.
(2) The power-out is nearly always not your fault. So you needn’t sit around feeling mad at yourself about it.

Well, apart from feeling mad at yourself for not having backed up your work, that is.
Okay, today the weather’s a lot warmer, and everything outside is dripping like mad. Yesterday I got a good upper-body workout shoveling snow (before the peace vigil.) Today, I guess I’ll go for a run.
So that’s the weather news from wintry old Charlottesville.