An inauspicious start to the day.
Feb. 19th, 2003 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaThe IHV is open today, so I set out to go to work. I dressed sensibly, in boots and jeans - I wasn't scheduled to work in the clinic, and the one client I was supposed to see wasn't likely to venture out in the snow. I believed that I was ready to face the elements.
That belief lasted for approximately two seconds after I stepped out from under the shelter of my building's covered entry. I stepped on a patch of ice and immediately found myself flat on my back. I struggled to my feet with difficulty - the whole sidewalk was slick - gathered my belongings, and made my slow way out to the car.
All day yesterday, smiling through our aches,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel and I had congratulated ourselves on our virtue and hard work in digging the car out. All that lay between the car and the outside world was a little ridge of icy packed snow thrown up by the plow - low enough that the wheels were sure to cross it easily. And indeed, they did. However, the undercarriage was a different question. I got hung up once, twice, a third time, each time just when I was almost free. I hacked at the ridge of ice with the corner of a borrowed shovel, in lieu of ice pick. It worked - bits of ice were breaking away - but in infintessimally tiny amounts. I didn't really get anywhere until my upstairs neighbor appeared with a hatchet and the claw end of a hammer. Together we hacked the ice ridge to pieces, and after one more heartrending lurch-and-catch, I broke free.
During the ice-hacking saga, another one of my neighbors came rolling back into the complex. He rolled down his window. "Are you heading up 95 to Baltimore?" he asked. "I was just there. It's bumper to bumper traffic as soon as you get out there. I finally turned around - you might want to stay home." He turned out to be right. A mile after I reached the interstate, traffic slowed to a crawl and I did want to stay home. But a phone call to Lydia - "Lydia, it's taken me a half-hour to go five miles!" - made it clear that I really needed to go to work anyway. So I stuck it out. Discovered that they had closed two lanes for snow removal. Discovered further on that lanes had a tendency to disappear under the snow without warning. Sometimes lots of lanes.
I abandoned my usual cheap parking lot to park in a covered, iceless garage next door to my building, despite the exorbitant hourly rate. As I waited for the elevator, my purse strap snapped. I noticed that my hand was aching and looked down to see a puffy bruise forming at the base of my left middle finger, presumably from falling with my keys clenched in my hand. It doesn't interfere with typing, but tomorrow I'll be in the clinic and trying to keep up with a vast amount of handwritten notes.
It's eleven o'clock, and not looking to be my day. And here I thought that the end of being housebound meant that things would be looking up.
That belief lasted for approximately two seconds after I stepped out from under the shelter of my building's covered entry. I stepped on a patch of ice and immediately found myself flat on my back. I struggled to my feet with difficulty - the whole sidewalk was slick - gathered my belongings, and made my slow way out to the car.
All day yesterday, smiling through our aches,
curiousangel and I had congratulated ourselves on our virtue and hard work in digging the car out. All that lay between the car and the outside world was a little ridge of icy packed snow thrown up by the plow - low enough that the wheels were sure to cross it easily. And indeed, they did. However, the undercarriage was a different question. I got hung up once, twice, a third time, each time just when I was almost free. I hacked at the ridge of ice with the corner of a borrowed shovel, in lieu of ice pick. It worked - bits of ice were breaking away - but in infintessimally tiny amounts. I didn't really get anywhere until my upstairs neighbor appeared with a hatchet and the claw end of a hammer. Together we hacked the ice ridge to pieces, and after one more heartrending lurch-and-catch, I broke free.During the ice-hacking saga, another one of my neighbors came rolling back into the complex. He rolled down his window. "Are you heading up 95 to Baltimore?" he asked. "I was just there. It's bumper to bumper traffic as soon as you get out there. I finally turned around - you might want to stay home." He turned out to be right. A mile after I reached the interstate, traffic slowed to a crawl and I did want to stay home. But a phone call to Lydia - "Lydia, it's taken me a half-hour to go five miles!" - made it clear that I really needed to go to work anyway. So I stuck it out. Discovered that they had closed two lanes for snow removal. Discovered further on that lanes had a tendency to disappear under the snow without warning. Sometimes lots of lanes.
I abandoned my usual cheap parking lot to park in a covered, iceless garage next door to my building, despite the exorbitant hourly rate. As I waited for the elevator, my purse strap snapped. I noticed that my hand was aching and looked down to see a puffy bruise forming at the base of my left middle finger, presumably from falling with my keys clenched in my hand. It doesn't interfere with typing, but tomorrow I'll be in the clinic and trying to keep up with a vast amount of handwritten notes.
It's eleven o'clock, and not looking to be my day. And here I thought that the end of being housebound meant that things would be looking up.
