^{Why yes, that *is* hail bouncing off my office window!}

Today, it snowed and then hailed and then snowed some more. Everyone else in the office ended up going home early–my boss offered to let me go saying that he didn’t want me to get trapped there, but the project manager had demanded package tracking numbers which I could not obtain until the late afternoon, so I stayed. At the end of the workday, I scraped the car clean, popped on the heater, drove two blocks, and my jaw dropped. Cars were way the hell backed up, and I prepped myself for a hell of a long ride home, even though I live quite close to work. As soon as I pulled onto a more main road, however, I realized there was a problem…the snow on the roads had melted a bit and re-frozen into a sheet of ice. As I made this realization, the car in front of me fishtailed, hit the curb, and then when it backed up, it nearly hit me.

I made an executive decision: turn into the next parking lot, drive back to work, leave the car there overnight and walk home.

This was the correct decision to make. I would have sat in traffic for a very long time, evidenced by me passing the car that had nearly hit me still sitting almost in the exact same spot in the time it took me to drive back to the office and then walk back. As I made my way up the hill over highway 167, I saw a group of three men helping to push cars up the hill, as so many were ineffectively spinning their tires. I decided to lend a hand, and spent the next hour and a half pushing cars, vans, and trucks up the hill, and even a goddamned semi out of an intersection. We also cleared a path for an ambulance! Along the way, we picked up more people–one woman who had just gotten back from Montana had a bunch of road salt in her truck so she stopped and started spreading salt out on the road in front of stuck vehicles. Another man showed up with a shovel and started digging people out. People in stalled cars further back hopped out and helped people who were farther up the hill. It felt really good to help these people out and be part of the solution, especially since I know I would have been part of the problem had I elected to continue the drive home.

After a while, traffic started to clear, and people were no longer having issues getting up that section of road, so I walked with the guys back up the hill–we parted ways at the hospital, as one of their wives was in the process of having a baby. I continued on my merry way home, simultaneously warm from all the running and pushing and yet cold to the bone, and still ended up pushing another car out of the hospital employee parking lot. I don’t envy those who have to drive anywhere right now, and tomorrow morning after the roads are freshly frozen again, I will envy people less, if that’s even possible. At least in the midwest when it’s so cold that cows freeze into solid blocks and mastadons start thinking about making a comeback, most everything is flat so you don’t have to contend with hills coated in sheets of ice.

This is going to be a nasty winter, and I’m not looking forward to it. If the roads are still this bad on Thursday and Friday, all signs point to me having Thanksgiving dinner at Shari’s diner instead of with friends, which is a thought that defies physics by both sucking and blowing at the same time. But I am thankful to have a little faith back in the general good nature of humanity and willingness to band together to help each other out.

Yesterday, confusednazgul hosted a Labyrinth-watching party, to which I invited myself–a fairly bold/rude move on my part, given that we’d never actually met in person before. I was fairly certain, however, that she wasn’t going to up and murder me in a back room, and also I was promised crabcakes. Crabcakes and David Bowie Glitterjunk may well be THE enticement required to lure me just about anywhere.

One of my more useful not-so-superpowers is to be able to walk into a room of strangers and be able to strike up conversations, so while I didn’t know anyone going in, by the end of the day, we were cracking jokes and having impromptu raise-the-roof dance parties in the middle of the swankiest apartment building I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing firsthand. It was seriously swanky. In addition to the movie theater, it had a fancy coffee bar, media center, gathering room with a ridiculous amount of TVs, a central wine-storage location…even the bathroom mirrors had embedded TVs, in case you couldn’t bear to be away from one for a moment while washing your hands! Just to put it in perspective, in MY apartment complex, people keep fucking up the hot tub by adding soap and one of my neighbors decorated for Thanksgiving by writing ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ backward on her window in what appeared to be black magic marker. (Christ, I wish I had gotten a picture of it before it disappeared later that afternoon!)

After the movie, we took the party elevator up to the roof, petted the world’s tiniest puppy, and peered in the window of a four million dollar condo to watch a man playing World of Warcraft sans pants and debate about whether or not he was wearing boxers. After we each took a turn peeping at him with binoculars (hot DAMN one of these girls was a proper girlscout), we came to the general conclusion that some form of brief was present, though one partygoer insisted that she did indeed see some junk when he leaned back to stretch…so, in the fashion of the Tootsie Pop Mystery, we may never know.