That was after lunch. There was a little bit of falling ice before barbecue with Brian. And it really picked up on my way back to campus. By the time I’d parked I was faced with having to walk through that.
Two hours later, the ground looked like this:
That’s just ice. The sidewalks were slippery and the roads were getting worse. The university canceled classes, including mine, to close early. That decision was just in time. After putting a note on the door, gathering up all of my things and stopping by the boss’ office I made it off campus with pretty much everybody else. It took me half an hour to go the 1.8 miles from the campus to the interstate. The roads got a little slippery and everyone in the city left work at precisely the same time.
After that, apparently, everything got worse. There were plenty of reports of bad roads, fender-benders, an accident with a fatality up north and lots of stories of no progress on the roads.
I found one slippery spot, on an overpass, and soon after outran the traffic and then the freezing rain.
So I spent the evening making recruiting phone calls for our department. One very nice lady asked how the weather was.
“Well, today isn’t the right day to ask that question … ”
She laughed. They were getting ready for it to land on them, she said.
So I worked through the evening on phone calls until it got to late to do that. We had dinner with our friends Shane and Brian. Shane’s father is in town, and he walked in with his Airborne veterans hat on. He cuts an imposing figure, but is a nice guy. Turns out his grandfather was close friends with a former president of Samford. Small world.
