This last week we had an ice storm here in Northern Virginia. Miriam stayed home (and off the roads); and I stayed home, too. Unfortunately, there was no time for slacking, I ended up working from home nearly non-stop. I tried to take a little nap at 4:00 PM (I'd been up since 3:30 for an install) and, sure enough, I get paged at 4:20 because one of my new, major projects was in the middle of an outage. Damn.

The ice storm was a little surreal for me. I lived in Salt Lake City until I was eleven, and then I lived in Reno for two years, so I know snow. But this was a whole new weather experience for me. The rain is liquid as it is coming down, but the ground, trees and nearly every other surface is below freezing, so the rain freezes on contact. After a few hours, everything was covered in at least an eighth of an inch of ice.

The night before the storm I brought in about six loads of fire wood, in case the power went out. I still don't have a decent pair of boots, so I got plenty of snow in my shoes as I trudged back and forth through the backyard. Thankfully, we never had to use any of the wood -- our power never went out.

The morning of the next day was a little strange, too. Once the temperature got to about 36, and the sun came out, the ice started melting. Looking out the window, it looked like it was raining again, as all of the melted ice dripped off the trees.