I hate winter.

Before you roll your eyes and think something like, 'that chick don't know nothin' about bad weather' I'll tell you I'm originally from Colorado.

And in Colorado, we got a lot of snow.
I've lived in Vale, La Grande and John Day Oregon,too.
I understand what it's like to be in the cold for months and months. I know what it's like to have two or three feet of snow. I understand below zero weather.

I wish I didn't, I hate being cold.

But it's different here.
First, almost no one seems to understand a very basic rule for driving in winter conditions... slow the hell down.

No, really. SLOW DOWN. I don't care if you have 4wd, either. That doesn't mean you can drive the way you usually do, it just means that you'll have slightly better traction than most of us. You still need to leave extra stopping distance. You will still slip and slide a bit if you're not careful.

On Friday night the forecast was for the end of the world.
I mentioned to Eric in passing that I had considered a rotisserie chicken for dinner, but as my kids were picked up and I talked with parents, I changed my mind. I heard about 2 hour lines at Walmart, people waiting for 40 minutes to fill their gas tanks and all the crazy traffic and decided we'd just go home when Eric picked me up. He was off work for the day, so drove me to and from. Kind of nice.

He had other ideas. Insisted on getting me a chicken at Fred Meyer. The parking lot looked like an anthill. It was utterly crazy. I have never seen it like that, not even during the holidaze.

I kept trying to talk him out of going in. "I'll eat scrambled eggs and toast. You're crazy if you think you're going in there!"

But he made me park the car and he went in.
Where, of course, they were completely out of already cooked chickens.
He called me from inside the store to tell me they were out of milk, too.
And bread.
And this and that.

"Is there anything else you want?" he asked.
"Well, if they have some of those little cherry pastries I like, that would be great."

So then he called me back a couple minutes later and said, "You mean the cherry streusel things?"

I told him that would be fine, and he said, "I have the last package of them, I'm walking around with it and some guy is eyeballing it. Wanted to make sure."

Now that's funny.
Or at least I found it so.

But the frenzied Friday shopping was like a horde of locusts and made the local news. Someone posted an emptied bin of Kale on the book of Face, calling it a uniquely Portland thing.

I guess the kale-munching wooly-headed Yuppicansis weren't the only people who thought going to the store was a good idea.

Hey! Emo! Pass the orthopedic cheese.

I figured we'd stay home from our usual Saturday grocery run, we have plenty of stuff on hand all the time. But Eric thought it would be a good idea to go. The weather jerks told us that we were going to be buried under possibly 14 inches of snow in the next 5 days. So we went. It looked like the apocalypse had happened in that store. The only milk left on the shelves was skim. Who the hell drinks skim milk? Not even the desperate. Blech.

I'm actually supposed to purchase that kind of milk for my kids. I don't. I use the milk card they provide and buy 2%. Kids don't need low fat anything. Fat isn't what causes obesity, either. In case you didn't know.

So we've had some crazy weather.
(It's not really crazy... happens almost every year.)

I actually thought we weren't going to have the snow/ice/snow thing this year because here we are in mid-February and it hadn't happened.
But then BOOM.

My program got kicked out of the school last week on Monday at 3, a precautionary measure. The roads weren't impassable or scary until about 8 or 9 PM, so we really could have stayed in the building until parents picked up at their usual times, but I don't get a choice when that happens.

Of course the entire area shuts down when we get snow, so the school schedule is crazy, too. Yesterday morning I had no morning program, because when the school is on a two hour delayed start, I have no program.

In my old job, if school was on a two hour delay, our program was, too. I had a lot further to drive back then, it was a little over eight miles from my house to the front door of the school. And eight miles home. And eight miles back in the afternoon. And eight miles home again.

On those mornings that we started two hours late, there was usually more ice and snow than I was comfortable with. Logically, if it isn't safe for kids and buses etc, I don't know why it was deemed safe for us.

As usual no one asked me.

But it's one more thing about this job that's better than that one.
I could make you a list with at least 20 things on it. Yeah, it was hard to leave, but I am glad now that I did. I'll never forgive that morally bankrupt harpy and her bevy of beastly bitches, but that's a separate issue.

I'm thinking that the worst of the weather is over, though.

This morning there was an ant on my kitchen counter and a spider in the bathroom AND one in the momcave while I was getting dressed for work.

It's raining, but there's still snow on the ground, more of it out by where I work, but there's still some in my yard, too.

And did I mention it's raining?

:::sigh:::