God, how does he *always* know?

Winter has a knack for showing up like clockwork every December 1, like its alarm clock went off and it suddenly realized it was late for work. This year's edition of the Two Days Ago It Was 60 Degrees show saw a blizzard whomp Chicago. I was staying at Alma's up north and ended up being so snowed in (by about a foot of snow) that I couldn't get to the Metra and eventually had to miss work. That's always pretty embarrassing, because there's really no such thing as a snow day once you're out of high school. I'm going to end up going in either tomorrow or Sunday (preferably tomorrow, but we'll see just how badly I got plowed in and how easy it is to dig out, especially if the snow freezes up overnight) to make up the time, which is always fun.

The annoying thing was expending all this energy trying to dig the car out and just failing miserably. I'd dig out the wheels, try and dig out the space into which I was planning on driving, and then get back in the car - and then I might go two feet and the whole process had to start again. It was a big-time losing battle, considering that there was no fewer than about six inches of snow on the ground in the parking lot and sometimes more where the plows had pushed it up during their first pass some hours before. I ended up having to dig the car out just to get it back into the space from which I had been trying to extract it. Bad, bad times. I've been inside for the past thirteen hours and my pants still aren't totally dry.

You have to expect weather like this when you live in Chicago, and I've dealt with worse (although honestly, it rarely has been this bad for the first snow of the year, the October 14 non-stick aberration notwithstanding), but coming so soon after the balmy weather of midweek (I was able to wear my Man City windbreaker to work on Wednesday!) it was a real kick in the butt.