After some introspection on what I’ve been doing and why, I think I’ve perhaps been stalling a bit (okay more than a bit) on my fiction projects. I think that is partly because I really burned the midnight oil to get the non-fic book done but I’m partly scared of having no more excuses to prevent me from sending Raven’s White Hart out to agents and publishers.

So now I’m back to working on Raven’s White Hart and its synopsis. My goal is to have the synopsis done by the end of the month.

I’m taking a deep breath and diving back in…..

I’m really not used to protracted cold weather in Western Washington and the last month or so has been nothing but consistently odd and inconsistently COLD. Last week it took me three hours to make a normally 30-45 minute drive home and I left work early, long before everyone else panicked. It’s been between 25 and 31 since – that’s three days that I’ve just stayed home. My blog has more details on the scary drive home and the crazy slip-and-slide of my attempt to leave the house yesterday.

Of course the enforced homebound-ness would be more appreciated if it were not in the company of a five year old who really wants to play and a husband who really wants to talk to me.

On the good side, I came up with a really interesting story idea that the Muses have created from my annoyance with the weather and my fascination with storms, especially lightning storms. If I manage to complete the test reading I’m working on today, I will try to post the short start of that idea.

With all the weird stuff going on with the weather, I worked from home yesterday. I really wasn’t comfortable with how slippery the driveway and local roads are. C took M to daycare and picked him up (something about him being far more comfortable driving on slick roads than I am).

Today I caved to C’s plans of leaving for work Way Early (before daycare was opened) and planned on taking M to daycare myself. I had hoped that when C actually didn’t get up until I woke him up (after daycare was open), he would volunteer to take M anyway. No such luck.

So I decide that I’m still not going in to my office but would take M to daycare – that way I could actually get work done. It couldn’t be too bad, after all. C had assured my that I would have been fine yesterday and would be today too.

I cry Bullshit.

It’s 31 in the garage when I leave (after this tale is over I moved the thermometer to the back patio and it registered 26).

M and I (mostly I) spent 15 minutes scraping about 1/4 inch of ice from the my car. Mind you this is ICE, not snow. Then it took another minute or two to try to pry open the car doors that have managed to freeze themselves shut. Joy.

The next step was to try to get out of the driveway. The car was stuck but a few cycles of rocking back and forth managed to escape that. Down the driveway was a little slick, as was the private gravel road. The intersection between it and the first paved road was quite slick but I managed it.

Because I had to take an uphill right next to our road, I went the opposite way about a block, made a careful u-turn and made a run for the hill. Now I wasn’t going all that fast because I was trying to walk the fine line between the desire for momentum and not creaming myself, oncoming traffic or anything else if something went wrong. I had gotten a look at the hill and it looked a lot like packed ice to me.

Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill……

About half the way up the tune changed to….

Sliding down the hill, down the hill, down the hill…..

At the bottom I had zero traction and was making a marvelous backward pirouette until I had done about a 180 and was about a foot from being in the ditch.

A few deep breaths and I told M that we were just going to go home now. It was just too slick for me. He never panicked (neither did I) but it was a bit adrenaline raising.

I called daycare to let them know M wasn’t coming today. Then I called C and let him have it.

New rules:
1) If I say I’m not comfortable driving with the current road conditions, do not argue with me. Your comfort level is NOT mine and I do not have nearly the same degree of experience you do.
2) If I ask you to take M to daycare because of road conditions, please just do it if at all possible. I don’t make you mortgage a body part when you ask me to ferry in your place – please exercise the same courtesy.
3) Next car I get must have all wheel drive and I always get mud/snow rated tires.

Sigh – if it’s not better tomorrow, I’m going to have cabin fever. It’s 7:45 pm now and 25 degrees outside. Not looking much like thawing.

Today I was catching up on various family news with my sister and she mentioned that her daughter (4) had been having laser treatments for a hemangioma and during her first treatment had an episode of ventricular arrhythmia where her heartbeat rose to over 200 beats per minute. Scarey stuff.

So my sister took her to a very experienced and reknown pediatric cardiologist in her area and he had my sister gather some family history which my sister relayed to me. I was never aware that my mother and my siblings all have ventricular arrythmias to one degree or another. Apparently, according to my sister, although this condition is often congenital, it’s rare to have a cluster of it in a family.

When I described what I’ve explained away as just an odd ball feeling or maybe a small panic attack or something is exactly the symptoms of an episode of ventricular arrhythmia.

Okaaaaaaaaay.

So several members of my family have a diagnosed heart condition that is not necessarily life threatening if not severe and this is the first I’ve heard about it??

I guess I’ll make an appt and talk to a cardiologist so I know what to watch for, if there is any testing I need to have done and what steps I can take if I do have it.

Nothing like a nice surprise to make you think, huh?

As some of you may know, I live in the Puget Sound area and we’ve been having the Weird Weather the last few months. Normally we get a few inches of snow and it’s gone later that day or the next day and that cycle occurs a few times each Winter. The local drivers and weather-guessers do get all worked up over it with reports of a Snow Event and dire warnings that don’t amount to much.

(In no way am I going to neglect to point out that the slightest sight of snow – or rain – or sun – or anything different from what they saw within the last two hours and the drivers around here turn into dipshits. They start driving either like maniacs or blind old men and instantly lose fifty IQ points – that’s 50 points they can’t afford to lose.)

On November 27th we had a serious storm that hit while I was already on the way home. Lots of snow and hail and very very cold so things iced up almost instantly. It took me over an hour to get home from only about two miles away. Poor C took almost 4 hours to get home and had to stop and buy chains.

This time I really wasn’t as apt to just ignore the storm warnings and when my friend Jo was IMing me with reports that it was starting to snow near my house, I decided to not take too many chances and left my office at 3:45pm. Thankfully there wasn’t anything that required me to stay at work.

The mistake that would come back to haunt me was that when I got into the car, my mind was on the drive and I plopped my laptop and my purse into the trunk. My cell phone was in the purse. Ooops.

The first sign of the true ugliness occurred about 5 miles from the office. It started to snow the little light popcorn hail – about the size of lentils. Within a mile and a few minutes, this had turned to hail the size of sweet peas and the traffic came to a stop. The road was becoming coated as the hail stuck and it took literally 30 minutes to go only 2 blocks.

I did briefly debate getting out and fishing my phone from the trunk but I was both afraid of becoming stuck and really didn’t want to drive and talk at the same time in this weather.

I was taking some back roads and listening to news radio so I knew all routes were equally awful and I decided to just stick this out. We slowly crept along the backroads for literally hours. The roads got slicker as the sun went down as well as the temperature and people started to get impatient. Some drivers turned around to try some other option. Some were driving erratically and out of their lane. Some were behaving well.

I had a small SUV thing behind me who decided to flash his brights every time he didn’t like the speed I was going. Excuse me but I wanted to keep moving at whatever pace it took to have to stop the fewest times possible. Every time I had to stop then tried to get moving again it was harder and harder to do so without spinning tires. Apparently the driver following me would much rather I start and stop constantly instead. If I wasn’t so afraid of getting stuck, I would have stopped my car, gotten out and walked back to him to see if he was in distress or something. Surely he would only be such an ass in the direst circumstances, right?

After two hours, I finally got into the town near mine where the roads weren’t so bad and made a bit of time through there until I came out the other side and decided to take the local highway instead of the freeway (this was easy once I saw the traffic on the highway and heard about a jack-knifed semi up the highway a bit). Almost three hours later I arrived at M’s daycare and C arrived there only about 5-7 minutes after I did.

I didn’t try to go home first because our driveway is fairly steep and if this storm was like the last one, it would become quite tricky to get back down again without a dive into the ditch across the private road from the end of the driveway.

M was still at daycare and snuggling with his caretaker so I didn’t waste the trip there.

We made it up the driveway (momentum is a wonderful thing) and I can tell it will be bad if it’s as cold as they predict – there was a fair amount of slush and standing water that will be happy to turn into ice. Thankfully I can just call in if necessary and work from home.

I really am TIRED of storms….