What’s up with the weather?

I should get a t-shirt made up “I survived the ice storm of 2008”. The past several days up here in my little corner of the US, the weather has been down right crazy. Now I am from Chicago, so I am used to cold and snow in fact native Mainers always seem a bit bothered that I don’t find winters to be all that taxing up here. Truth is the average winter temperature up here is warmer than Chicago, shit, I grew up back when the wind chill factor used to regularly dip below 0, so in general winter does not faze me. Truth is I will take winter any day over being hot, much to my in-laws annoyance that we will never live near them in Arizona. Shit, that place is hot as hell, might even be hotter.

However last Thursday night the weather decided to throw something new at me and for once I gotta say, yeah the weather up here is wild. We had a ice storm, initially it didn’t seem that impressive until I woke up and friends started calling me on Friday talking about how they had no power. Well our power went out too, but only in brief spurts, seems since I live in town, I am on the same grid as the police and fire department so it explains why our power has never gone out longer than an hour or two…ever.

Well I had no idea how bad it was until the spousal unit got up to get me one of those lovely hot chocolates I love from Starbucks, dude calls me to say sorry babe, Starbucks is closed, no power. Turned out the whole damn town was closed except for a few places, couldn’t even buy water because the store sold out. Now, I am a big city girl but being stuck in my house with a 3 year old going on 17 and no relief in sight is like hell, she wanted to leave the house but the damn traffic signals didn’t work and even the spousal unit who is a proficient driver having learned eons ago in California was like we need to stay in the house.

Sadly, its 5 days later and there are still a number of folks in Maine and New Hampshire who are still sitting in the dark and its snowing today. Of course Monday the temperature hit almost 60… I don’t know about you but something is really strange with the weather these days.

So what’s the weather like where you are? As for me, I am working from home today since I already braved the snow once today for an early morning meeting.