A doom of ice descends upon us all. Probably, anyway. Once it rains next week and melts all of this almost two feet of snow, it will eventually get cold and freeze all of that slush and water. Normally, I’d say something about being terrified of road conditions in weather lik that, but we’ve already got roads of solid ice thanks to the city doing such a shit job at plowing everything but the arterial roadways and the fact that they’re cutting back on salt a huge amount this year. I didn’t expect them to cut back on sanding or gritting the roads as well, too, but here I am slipping and sliding around everywhere because all the salted places didn’t get salted enough to deal with the ice before the sun sets and it all refreezes, so there’s at least a little bit too much ice everywhere and an unsafe amount of it everywhere I drive on a daily basis except the highway. I honestly don’t know what the hell anyone is thinking because this seems incredibly dangerous. I mean, I’m used to seeing cars in ditches during and for a couple days after snow storms. What I don’t expect is to see new cars in ditches every single day for (as of writing this) seven days after the blizzard.

After the first couple days of driving recklessly in these now-icy streets, people swapped to driving over-cautiously, so I’ve seen more accidents than ever because people are braking too suddenly, sliding forward into intersections, or actually managing to stop while the people behind them slide forward into their rear fender. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen the roads this bad, in terms of basic conditions and driver behavior. Even as skilled as I am (and I’m VERY good at driving in poor conditions thanks to driving a car with a manual transmission and taking a defensive driving course-type-thing in college), I’m still slipping and sliding around in places where the city/county should have ABSOLUTELY salted or gritted more than they have. I mean, given how long this has been going on, I’d have expected a second or even third layer of salt or grit at this point and I haven’t seen shit. It’s supposed to snow more tonight and I’m genuinely concerned that these already bad road conditions are going to somehow be made even worse [they were since the fresh snow was just left there, untouched]. I mean, it’s very easy to imagine, you know? A layer of fresh snow on top of the ice, hiding the dangerous patches of ice from observation so that you don’t know when to be careful or even how to be careful. It’s infuriating.

I get that the US’s decision to use salt to solve every road-based snow problem nature throws at us was never a good idea, but there are proven alternatives at this point. Sure, it might be expensive to have people constantly driving around with a truckbed full of sand or whatever, but it’s probably a lot less expensive than all of the accidents I’ve seen. Though, to be completely fair to the city, most of the people I’ve seen in ditches along roads are in positions that leave me unable to comprehend how they got there. I saw one car this morning that looked like it had been tossed onto a snowbank. I can’t imagine how the physics of them sliding into said snowbank got them into the position they were in, but its difficult to argue with results. And they absolutely shouldn’t be dealing with ice in that spot since its right next to a major off-ramp for the nearby highway and every other off or on ramp for the highway near there was as heavily salted as the highway was, so I can’t comprehend why this particular section of road was deliberately ignored. Still, they must have been driving pretty wildly to have run up the snowbank rather than into it, especially at such a cattywampus angle. At the other end of this confusing spectrum are the two people I saw in the ditch along the highway while I drove to work this morning. Both of them had slide tracks away from places that had absolutely zero ice and had no ice for multiple days. I have no idea how they could have gone off the road other than for the usual reasons of inattentive driving or falling asleep at the wheel, but that wouldn’t explain the tracks they left as they ran off the cleared, dry, and salt-encrusted highway through the snow on the verge into the ditch. Just absolutely boggling.

And it’s only going to get worse. Between the snow coming tonight (the night I write this), the temperatures rising to hover around freezing, and the rain/sleet we’ll be getting the day this post goes up, road conditions are going to likely become untennable. I am genuinely considering working from home for a few days just to avoid the reckless driving in such awful conditions. I probably won’t have that luxury, though, given how work has been going the week I’m writing this (and I say “week” because this is my third day trying to work on this blog post between work tasks and the first time I’ve been able to do more than briefly rub two thoughts together before I got pulled away by someone or something new). The projects I’m working on require being physically present and all the work I can do remotely has been pretty seriously downgraded priority-wise. Plus, it’s not like my apartment is the safe harbor it felt like a week ago. I discovered that my ktichen’s window leaks thanks to snowmelt, which also froze a bunch and made things worse, before maintenance finally showed up to fix the problem four days after I reported it. I have terrible luck with this rental property and leaks, apparently, and the maintenance guy tried to blame me by saying that not having the heat up high enough was the cause of the problem. I know for a fact, thanks to two days at his recommended temperature settings, that the ice would have formed anyway thanks to the shitty windows and the all the water leaking into my apartment due to the escaping heat melting the snow above the window. Fully documented and ready to contest any charges to my security deposit if they try to hit me with anything after all this shoddy work and them changing my thermostat settings without talking to me.

Winter has officially lost its luster. I’m ready for warmer days and a time when I don’t need to deal with ice and the ways it is making my life miserable. I had my two days of fun during the last two blizzards and I’m ready for the spring. Which, judging by the forecasts, looks like it is already on its way with potential for flash floods. Just an absolutely stellar year already, twenty-three days in. I swear to every god ever named and those yet to come that I will slap anyone I meet who says, to my face, that climate change isn’t real, isn’t a result of humanity, or isn’t a massive problem we need to start working on immediately. Full force and with absolutely zero regret.