Winter white

Catchup Tally

New pages written: 4 (goal: 6.2 pages per day)
Old pages revised on paper: Chapters Prologue, 1-3 on paper; Chapters 5-7, half of 8 on screen
Pages of revisions typed in: 50
Pages lost or gained due to revisions: +5
Total page count to date: 178 (goal: 200)
Days remaining until D-day: 14 days (YIKES!)
Emails from editor in UK: 0
Emails from agent in NY: 0 (but my contracts arrived on Saturday)

Chocolate consumed: Hershey's bar, chocolate ice cream
Junk food consumed: none
Exercise: Pilates Session on Monday
Television watched: a little American Idle on Tuesday
Tears: None.
Link for the day: Slipping and sliding in Portland Check out this snow day video taken from someone who lives in downtown Portland.

School has been cancelled once again. I don't even want to think what this will mean at the end of the school year. With the MLK holiday on Monday that means the youngest kidlet misses an entire week of preschool.

The only good news is hubby can't get to work, either, so I actually got a lot of writing done yesterday. I went through the entire book. Well, all that I'd written so far except for the last chapter.

Today, which is usually my busiest day of the week so I normally don't write, is now totally free. Everything has been cancelled so I get to write. Hmmm. Maybe this snow thing isn't so bad afterall!

If you want to see what driving conditions can be like around here when it gets really bad, check out the link for the day. Why didn't they put on chains or just stay home? That's my questions. I really wonder what's going to happen to those people's insurance premiums!

I learned to drive in Eastern Washington. Liberty Lake, outside of Spokane near the Idaho border, to be exact. Driving in snow was a requirement if you wanted to go anywhere in the winter. Once my friend high school friend Becky was driving a bunch of us somewhere. We hit a patch of black ice and spun. I still remember all of us screaming. Luckily we didn't hit anything though we were in one of those huge, gas-guzzling made of steel kind of parent cars from the 1980s. We all laughed and went on our way. No big deal.

Here in the Portland metro area though, you have many people who have no clue how to drive in snow, a city that at least yesterday seemed overwhelmed by the amount that fell and most importantly, ice. Ice just sucks.

During one of the big ice storms (1996, I think) hubby and I had flown up from SF to visit my parents. The ice storm hit as we were driving back from the coast. I didn't want my parents to take us to the airport so we took a shuttle from the Salem Airport. Near the Portland Airport (PDX) there was a chain reaction accident due to ice. We hit the shuttle van in front of us, someone else hit us. The vans stopped. We were sitting on I-205 right by a patch of ice watching semi trucks slide toward us. Not fun. And very scary. One came really close. I was sure it would hit us. Hubby told me to get off. Even though the driver said no, we did anyway. Another man explained to the driver that we were nothing more than a sitting target. The driver didn't care. Those were the rules. That guy and his wife got off too. We all climbed high up this cemented incline and waited under an overpass. When another truck brushed by the van, the rest of the occupants joined us. We finally made it to the airport where a lovely customer service rep for Alaska Airlines, upon hearing what we'd been through on our trip to PDX, put us on an earlier flight with no additional charge.

How is the weather where you are? Sunny, wet, snowy?