Ice Days

January 2007 will be remembered as the month of the great American ice storm. Here in central Texas we get hardly any winter (usually). But this is Tuesday evening and the end of the 3rd day we've all been here together at home because it was too dangerous to travel. (Well, Janis went to work on Monday morning at the hospital before the roads iced over, but other than that, we've been here.)

It had been raining already a few days when the cold air hit on Monday. So everything was already soaked and then started to freeze. Once the air got cold enough to get the road surfaces below 32, it was pretty much a done deal that Central Texas was going to shut down. Some people at Maxwell Locke & Ritter went to work on Monday, but not me. Fortunately we now have high speed Internet access here at the house, so I can access and manage our network at the office from home. I spent quite a bit of time on Monday helping others get onto our network servers remotely for the first time or solving other minor problems. It was interesting for a while, but one does get tired of just sitting at the desk on the computer all day.

It actually got worse on Tuesday (today) so that the office was actually closed and nobody went in today. The temperature stayed below freezing all day and the precip continued to fall. Now it's falling frozen rather than freezing on the road, but the base of ice is there and staying there until we warm up.

It seemed that fewer people tried to work today, or maybe had fewer problems, because the demands for my attention today were minimal.

Forecast for tomorrow is for more frozen precip ending around midday. Might get up over freezing briefly tomorrow afternoon, and then we should start to warm up on Thursday.

So its another day at home tomorrow. ACC is closed again tomorrow, so my evening class, which was to start, will have to wait until next week.

Looks like a two-day week at the office. : - ) Boy, I can't wait for the weekend!