A White February

We, like a large part of the country, got slammed with this crazy winter storm. It didn't really kick up until the afternoon, so I went in to work. The problem was, once I got there, they weren't being very accommodating of people who wanted to leave early. Eventually I did anyway. Andy said it was starting to get bad, and he didn't feel comfortable waiting any longer, so I left work about 1:15. I should have left sooner...or about 15 minutes later. Long story short, the roads were terrible. This mixed with rear wheel drive doesn't make for a pleasant trip home. It wasn't TOO bad until we got almost home. The state highway we live off of wasn't really plowed, and we got stuck in the turn lane. I had to get out and push, and eventually we made it through there. We then made it to the street we live on, which hadn't been plowed at all. We tried and tried to make it up the hill, and we were about to give up and park at the bottom, despite the fact that we'd get plowed in. We decided one more try, and ended up in the ditch.

A neighbor and I tried to push out, but the way the wheels were stuck it just made things worse. I called a tow truck, and they said it'd be 30 minutes. As I was on the phone with them, here comes the plow. They did a round and then stopped and said they weren't allowed to hook up chains but they'd help try to push. As I was explaining that only made matters worse, a neighbor stopped on his way home and said he had chains and would run up and get them. He got back and started talking to Andy. He said, 'I'm no physics major, but I don't think I can pull you guys up the hill....', which was pretty true. They decided to pull us out of the ditch down the hill. After a lot of flopping around in the snow, they found something to hook onto under the Mustang and they were off. I stood in another neighbor's driveway and we watched.

Andy & the neighbor, hooking up ;)

He got him out, and the neighbor I was next to said something to the effect of 'All right, he got him out!', and I was watching and replied, "Yeah, now if Andy can get his car stopped before he hits the truck," which was punctuated by the sound of the 2 cars hitting. Our neighbor, who we think is named Justin(?) pulled Andy out & stopped and Andy had too much momentum and not enough traction and sailed right into his trailer hitch. Luckily it didn't do anything to the truck, but the hitch mount poked a square hole right in Andy's rear bumper. Definitely a huge bummer. Come to find out, the tow trucks were gouging people for $300/ditch, so in the grand scheme of things I guess it's alright. The bumper will surely cost more than that, but it's not money we have to come up with TODAY, so that part is at least a relief. Even after all of that, we had to push the car up the hill to my house, and at that point it had been plowed.

When we got home I was exhausted and dirty and freezing. We hunkered down in our pajamas and just hid out from the cold. In the early evening we heard something outside, and another neighbor was blading the driveway for us!!!

Neighbors make rural living preferable.

So now we're trying to figure out something to make/buy for them. Andy's thinking of smoking some stuff. Shocking, I know, but I think that would be pretty cool - way better than baking cookies or something like that...

Be safe out there. Or better yet, don't go out there.

All Hell Breaks Loose!

The picture doesn't capture the way the day went. You can see the white umbrella in the far room if you look really closely....

Some contractors are working upstairs in our building to knock a wall down and double the size of our upstairs server room. In the process, a sprinkler line got broken...and chaos ensued.

Water started pouring through the ceiling downstairs. The IT manager ran upstairs in a frenzy when he'd heard the upstairs server room (mainly phone servers) sprinkler was broken. In the meantime, one of his employees heard water and opened the door to the downstairs server room, only to see water pouring down on top of all of the equipment that keeps our building functional. Plastic, umbrellas, and shop vacs came from all directions.

About that time, we hear that there are several inches of standing water in the locker room and it's still leaking into there as well. They emptied the sprinkler lines out at that time, but because of the pressure there was still a LOT that leaked. I walk through the ladies' room with a wet-dry vac to try to help with the locker room once the server room is under control, and there's water coming out of the light fixtures...not so good!

I then spent the afternoon in my socks squeegee-ing water toward the floor scrubber that someone else was running. The servers were basically all ruined. Our operations were down for the better part of 3 days.

What. a. disaster.