Once again a flurry of snow descends upon England like a plague of white locusts. Woke up to about an inch this morning, although it’s warming up quickly and I think most of it will be gone by this afternoon. What gets me though is how seemingly everyone who drives in this country has a brain fart at the first sight of a flake. Despite the fact that there is not a single spot of snow or ice on the road (it’s all melted), everyone who would normally race through rush hour like their balls were on fire suddenly drops to 15mph below the speed limit. Now I’m all for safe driving, but the road is barely wet. What is wrong with these people??
Luckily this slow-down was offset by the fact that there was a 30-min power outage at 4.15 in our part of town, and I think a lot of people’s alarm clocks didn’t go off. The usual 30-strong queue of mothers and children in their SUV’s driving 1/2 a mile to school was completely missing, cutting a good 1/3 off of my journey time.
How do I know it was at 4.15? I woke up practically the second it went off. I’m a light sleeper and I seem to notice subtle but important changes in my environment even when I’m asleep. The only clue would have been the near-silent forced air system going completely silent, but nonetheless when I checked all the stalled clocks in the house against the battery-powered ones, I had woken up right when it failed. Since I could see the snow out of the window by this point I called the power company, as I wanted my damn heating back before my morning shower. Apparently it was “a problem with the high-voltage system in our area”. “No s***,” I thought, “I could have told you that.” Probably down to the wrong kind of snow on the power cables.
Has anyone else noticed that the LJ spellchecker looks at “didn’t” and tells me that “didn” is a misspelled word?
