Well, no worries. Elaine just called, and she said that they got my voicemail at work, but because everyone is stuck at home and it's still snowing this morning, they've closed the office. I guess Renee and a couple of the guys in the back lost their electricity. CNN says that 300,000 people in Chicago are "without electricity," as they say, and there's some nasty snow north and west of the city, which happens to be where I'd have to go. It's not bad here, but I wouldn't want to guess what southern Wisconsin might be like. In Iowa, they're in the middle of a state of emergency and nobody's going anywhere today.
I had a friend in college from Virginia, and she used to say that they'd close school if it even looked like it might snow. Here, when I was growing up, they almost never closed the city schools. Out in the suburbs or out in the country, they'd close them if we had, say, a foot of snow, but here, they almost never closed. I guess I was envious of people in states that didn't know how to handle winter.
The street was plowed a little while ago, and I went over and got some things to make soup. Beef soup. Fargo will approve. I think we'll sit here for a while and see how things turn out, and maybe start out later for home.
It's now much later. It's actually tomorrow, since it's about 1:30 am. We finally got back here about an hour ago, and it was possibly the worst weather I have ever had to drive through. People were off I-94 in every conceivable manner, including one car up in Wisconsin that was on its roof in the left lane. I really, really don't know how they did it. But there were flares marking it, and everyone passed it without incident. Down here in Chicago, the streets are pretty bad, and I went through a couple of areas that looked like the power was off. It was very strange to not see those amber streetlights lighting everything up the way they do. It's incredibly cold out. I got back here, managed to park the Mercedes, and now it's time to try catching up on the approximately 300 mail messages that showed up while I was away.
I really, really like that car.