Enough 5mm hail to accumulate, switching to snow, with all kinds of slush and drivers who see snow not all that often. The normal drive home is about 17 minutes with no traffic. With traffic it is maybe 25 minutes usually. Today it took four hours and thirty-two minutes to drive the 10.9 miles home. Average speed… 2.4 miles per hour. And a full 16 times longer than normal! Woo!

Of course, I added an extra 30 minutes or so because I decided to go a quarter mile out of the way to stop at Burger King before I got on the highway. That decision cost me half an hour… perhaps a little bit more. And it also made me greatly regret getting a king sized Coke after the next 90 minutes in the car… before I escaped at the very next exit and managed to find a Starbucks to help with that issue… but that probably actually SAVED me some time, because I bypassed a couple of miles of bumper to bumper interstate to go on side roads to find the starbucks and ended up making better time than I would have on the Interstate.

Once off the Interstates there was one really steep hill that some people were having problems with, but I made it up the hill and then managed to get home…

Meanwhile, one hour or so after I left work, Brandy and Amy left a mall (after trying to go, seeing the traffic mess 90 minutes earlier and deciding to just wait a little while longer) that was 2.5 miles from home. They made it a little more than half way home (taking about 3 hours to get that far) then had to leave the car by the side of the road because they were on a hill that had become completely blocked by two large trucks (one of them a tow truck) who had gotten stuck on the hill and all the dozens of other cars that people had left because they could go no further. So they got out and walked the little bit more than a mile left home. They got home about 1 or 2 minutes after I did. They saw me pull into our street when they were almost there. Ha! I beat them!

Anyway, school has already been canceled for tomorrow. There is a good chance I will end up working from home tomorrow unless everything has been all cleared up by then. (Which it might be I guess, it doesn’t actually seem THAT bad… I’ve seen much worse back east, but of course they know a bit better how to handle snow it seems.) In any case, we’ll have to go retrieve Brandy’s car as soon as things seem to have normalized a bit. For the moment the weather people say there is more yet to come, and it won’t be above freezing again for several days, so what is coming down won’t be going anywhere fast.

Fun stuff.