It started snowing this morning and has been steadily increasing throughout the day. Driving back home after my final this afternoon was slow going, and driving home after a dinner party tonight was a veritable challenge. I literally could not see more than about 20 feet in front of me. Good thing it was only about 3 miles.

The dinner party was held by my colleague who works in the office next door. He's Indian, so we had a number of yummy dishes, including a very nice coriander lentil sauce. Now our stomachs are happy and we can enjoy a quiet evening at home for the rest of the night — perfect for a snowstorm.

I was planning to go grade exams tomorrow morning, but given the snow, I think I'm going to stay home. We're still planning to go to Chicago tomorrow afternoon to celebrate our 8th anniversary of dating at Japonais and then pick up my mother from O'Hare. But by that time the snow should have been cleared. I'm really glad she's not flying in tonight!

The big snow storm was well under way when I got up Tuesday morning. I saw a bunch of school and business closings, but the university was still listed as open, and I had to go back to my PC meeting anyway. I called the gym and they said they were open, so after some coffee, I jumped into the Subaru and headed out. Driving was kind of fun, between the lack of traction and the high winds, you kind of floated from side to side. When I got to the gym at 7:05, I found a notice saying "we're closed as of 7am." I went back home to grab a shower before heading in and finally decided to cancel my midterm later in the afternoon, with encouragement from fanlain.

I arrived into the office to find everything dead — no cars in the parking lot, no people inside. But my meeting was on, since it was mostly attended by outside guests who were staying in the hotel across the street. (Most of them ended up being stuck for another night, since leaving CU just wasn't going to happen.) At 8:50, I got the email that classes for the whole campus were canceled. This seemed like really poor timing, seeing as some classes started earlier than that. (In further display of administrative genius, it was explained that people who called in before the cancellation would have to take the day as a personal day, whereas everyone else got the day off.)

I went home after lunchtime and made it almost all the way home, but got stuck on a small side street. The people who lived there pushed me back out and I tried to drive home a different way, taking care to drive slowly enough to maintain control but quickly enough to not get stuck again. I actually missed the turn onto our street, since it was hard to see, so I turned around and powered through the snow to about halfway up our driveway. Then it was time to get out the shovel to clear a path to the garage.


In the evening, we got another message from the chancellor, canceling classes for Wednesday as well, even though the snow had stopped Tuesday night. When I woke up Wednesday morning, I saw that the plows had already been down our street, but there was a huge snowdrift in front of our garage. I spent about two hours in the morning digging a path wide enough for one car through our driveway. Since the Subaru got damaged when it got stuck in the snow and started leaking antifreeze, we ended up taking the Prius to work this morning, which required making an n-point turn inside our garage so that it could go out the clear part. I finally decided to clear up another chunk of the driveway so that we could actually access both cars. Tomorrow's project will be clearing a path to the front door.

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Tonight we had a power outage so we got to curl up on the couch by the fireplace while Soba ran around looking all agitated. It's funny how little of our house works when the power is out. We thought about taking a bath, since the water heater still works, but the forced air heater does not, so it would have been really cold getting out.

Wednesday night, as we were having coffee on the patio of Café Kopi, my colleague remarked that this literally the last few hours of pleasant weather we were going to have this winter. Indeed, at midnight it turned to rain, which became freezing rain by yesterday afternoon, and now we're in a full-blown snow-storm. Soba had been mostly cooped up at the house, driving us a little nuts with all the extra puppy energy, but today she's finally decided to brave the snow and has been running around in it... for brief stints.

Anyway, there's only one way to respond to weather like that — go to California! I'm spending the weekend plus Monday in the Bay area. That is, assuming I make my flight. Fortunately, I'm avoiding connections and flying straight out of O'Hare (this meant that we had to fix our second car so that fanlain could use it over the weekend.) United canceled the morning flight to Oakland, but mine is still on the schedule. Of course, that all could change, and I could even get stuck in the snow on my way to Chicago. Well, my plan is to leave right after my class and see if I'll make it. Unless all my students decide to skip class today...