Ice, ice baby

Today started off so great for me. I've had a bad headache all weekend and was not in the mood to get up be ready to drop Anthony off at school by 8 a.m. When my alarm went off this morning I knew I needed another good hour of sleep to really recover from the weekend. I turned off my alarm and figured I would just stay in bed until Anthony came back to our room and in his kind yet slightly-anxious way ask me if I was planning on showering. He never did. I woke up about an hour later and found him sitting on our couch like an anxious school child with the Today show on watching the school closing ticker at the bottom of the screen. We had an ice storm last night and the whole town had frozen over. I couldn't have asked for better timing. Before I got out of bed my half-asleep half-awake brain was consumed with thoughts of calling in sick to work, but knowing if I did I would be mad at myself as soon as I did. I hate calling in sick, plus we need the money, so rarely miss work. Due to my extra hour of sleep I was feeling great, so we made good use of the day by taking care of stuff we should have done this weekend but didn't because my head hurt and Anthony was busy taking care of me. Starting this afternoon we heard loud crackling sounds--branches breaking off trees. Around 9 p.m. I thought we should maybe check on our car. We could see branches out our window covered in a thick layer of ice. We gingerly made our way across the parking lot and started hacking at our car, which was also encased in about an inch of ice. It was kind of fun kicking and hacking at our car. It took us about half an hour to get all the ice off. We've both lived in cold weather places, but have never experienced anything like this before.

And that is not snow on our car--it is ice, very hard ice. We karate kicked our car to crack the ice.

Trees are bending over and breaking because they can't support the weight of the ice.