We're expecting a major winter storm to hit the Quad Cities later this afternoon into tonight. We could see 2 to 6 inches of snow along with freezing rain and sleet. Honestly, I don't mind the snow all that much - it's the ice that scares the living hell out of me.
We happen to be almost right on the edge of where a slight deviation in the storm track could nail us with 6 to 10 inches of snow, or we could see a half to three-quarters of an inch of freezing rain. Being on the edge, we could get hit with both snow and ice. That won't be fun.
The impending storm is the same one that shut down freeways in Southern California, dumped five inches of snow above Malibu, and hit Las Vegas with its most significant snowfall in more than 30 years. McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas was shut down, as well as many roads around the Las Vegas area.
We had a little ice storm on Sunday night. Well, there's no such thing as a little ice storm. It started out as rain on Sunday afternoon about 3 p.m. when the temperature was around 55 degrees. Two hours later, the temperature was 36. An hour later it was 27 - and still raining. The only saving grace is that it turned to sleet and then to snow. Then it got REALLY cold, so it wasn't easy to break up the ice with salt or a shovel.
Tuesday, I took off to go to Chicago to meet a colleague who was flying in for a meeting and dinner with one of our large national accounts. I got about 20 miles into Illinois and decided to turn around and head back home. It had taken me about 90 minutes to go about 40 miles. Now, the Illinois Department of Transportation said on Tuesday morning that Interstate 88 was under "normal winter driving conditions". Well, if "normal winter driving conditions" means that the left lane is a sheet of ice and the right lane is 25 to 50% ice covered, I wish they would have told me that in advance.
On top of that, we got MORE snow on Tuesday afternoon - about five inches worth. So I would have had to drive in that on the way home from Chicago on Wednesday morning. It wasn't worth it.
Now we're looking down the barrel of a third winter storm this week that could drop up to six inches of snow on us, along with a quarter inch of ice from freezing rain. Tomorrow is Cindy's birthday and I had planned on taking her somewhere for the weekend. But it looks now that we'll have to cancel as the storm is scheduled to continue into tomorrow. Oh, well. We can always take off some other weekend.
I'm just hoping that we don't lose our power.
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