At Night, the Ice Weasels Come

This week the residents of Central Texas, myself included, learned that you can still function as a human being in less than perfect weather. An unusually long and bitter cold spell (by our standards) has smothered the area with a inch or so of ice and snow. Snow is great. I like snow, mainly because I don't have to shovel it in April like people in certian lake-happy upper Midwestern states sometimes do. Unfortunetly pure snow is about as common here as sitting Governors that aren't evil. The ice/snow ratio this week was along the lines of 80/20. People freaked out. I kind of freaked out. Accidents happened. People died. Thousands climbed onto the top of the Frost Bank Tower awaiting the imminent return of Christ (or aliens in the case of South Austinites)...okay this is an exaggeration. What's not an exaggeration is today when I saw a traffic Jam on the freeway caused by people skittishly driving 5 miles per hour across a completely melted bridge (at least the freeway lanes were).

My least favorite aspect, aside from the preventable deaths and injuries, of the semi-annual Central Texas "winter storm" is hearing people from colder, crappier climates drone on and on about how people in Austin "don't know how to drive on the ice." Seriously, shut up. Mabye not ever having to do it has something to do with that. By your logic you should also be expressing shock at the inability of people in Cuba to play ice hockey, or suprise that there aren't more Egyptian quarterbacks in the NFL. Allthough I will agree that people here tend to use less than perfect weather as an excuse to be complete morons behind the wheel.

Locals dealt with the ice as well as they knew (a knowledge base that is a pretty small one). Of course no one who is from south of Dallas has an ice scraper...why would you ever need one? I'm lucky that I can park my car in a garage which saved my windshield from becoming even more cracked. Others who parked in the elements had to deal with a half inch to an inch of ice on their windshields. Since you never need an ice scraper in your car, I saw the following items being used to scrape ice off of windshields: A wooden spoon, a butter knife...and my favorte, a fork. I once used a screwdriver. I recommend that method as long as you don't mind having to get a new windshield.

But the importiant thing is that, among the estimated 1.5 million residents of the Austin Metro Area, 1,499,998 of us survived the ice apocalypse. Not a bad survival rate when you consider that many thought the world was coming to an end.