It's COLD!!!!!!!!!!

This has been one really hard week, weather-wise. I have to keep telling myself that this is Texas. It's too frigging cold!! This picture is my backyard this morning. The sun's finally out, so the snow should be mostly gone later today - I hope.

Let's see, last weekend was pretty if a little cool, but Monday night changed all that. We got a nice ice-storm Monday night into Tuesday morning. I gave it a shot - the driving in to work thing. I managed to get out of my neighborhood, but not to the highway. I hit a still slushy patch, it sprayed up on my windshield and froze. So I had little visibility as well as little traction. Yes, my defroster was on and functional, but the ice on my wipers themselves kept smearing ice across my field of vision. I gave it up. I just wasn't up for 28.5 miles of it, so I turned around and went home. I worked from home on Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday, I braved the still frozen conditions and made it to work and back both days, although Thursday afternoon going home I gave up on the highways and took back streets. The high temperature between Monday and Friday was 24 degrees (low of about 12), so nothing melted. Street and highway conditions only improved marginally, with passable ruts in heavy traffic areas, but the highways continued to have continuous wrecks, and disabled cars, abandoned cars and cars in ditches. Friday when I got up, Nature had added 5 inches of snow on top of the ice! So even Momma Nature isn't above adding insult to injury. I totally didn't expect it. Yes, the meteorologists were forecasting a 50% chance of a "dusting' of snow. And yes, I know they can't really forecast what it's going to do. But 5-7 inches in the metroplex is a significant difference from a 'dusting'. I drove in on the highways, and traction was actually the best I'd had all week, as long as you were careful and remembered there was ice under that snow. Friday afternoon the temperature approached freezing and roads started to melt. Lots of water, lots of slush and lots of ice still. I did the non-highway route most of the way. The bottom line? The fastest trip to or from work I made this week, not counting Monday which was a normal commute, was 1 hour and 15 minutes for that 28.5 miles. The worst was 1 hour 45 minutes. So not only does that add to my work day, but that 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours is extremely tense time spent - death grip on the steering wheel, watching all the other cars intently for slippage. I'm glad the week is over.

I'm equally glad I don't have to be anywhere this morning. All that water from melting snow and ice will have frozen solid again (temp of 21 overnight). This just doesn't seem like Texas to me this week. And they're forecasting more weather like this next Wednesday. That should about give it time to melt before we go again.

Another "interesting" weather-related development: It's been cold enough long enough for my pipes to freeze in my house! Nine and a half years I've been here and never had this happen before. My kitchen sink and my master bathroom shower froze. Both are opened back up now so hopefully there's no burst pipe damage. The shower I should have expected since it's on an outside wall, but since I use it every day, I didn't think about it. The kitchen sink is not on an outside wall so that one surprised me. The only other pipes I have on outside walls are the ones to the washer. I'll run that today after the temperature comes up over freezing and see how it does. The temperatue is supposed to get above freezing today.

Just so as to not have the entire blog be about the weather, things are going well at work and going not well at work. *laughing* Yes, those can both be true. I got all my lectures in on time and my colleague got me his half of the book, and I'm getting it whipped into shape to submit. Those are the good things. On the side of the bad things, we discovered incorrect units of measure on 1100+ test results that we released. So the lab gang spent two days correcting them, and I spent two days contacting 200+ doctors. Luckily the numeric results were fine and they matched the numeric reference ranges, so the units of measure correction was essentially clerical. A pain in the ass, but not affecting patient care. A worse issue was that a tech placed the incorrect fluid on a main analyzer, resulting in 60 incorrect test results that DID impact patient care. Those are still being followed up and require dealing with the doctors and with Risk Management. I'm not sure why errors of this nature tend to cluster. I can go long periods of time with no lab issues, then seem to have several at once. Something in the water?

It's gorgeously sunny out today, sparkling off all that snow. Yesterday afternoon was the first time all week the sun came out, which is why things finally started to melt. I have hopes that the melting will continue today, with all this sun. Oops, talking about the weather again.

I brought more lectures home to wok on over the weekend. These are resident CP lectures, so I should just be able to update them from previous lectures. Since I've been focusing on the book and those other lectures at work, I decided to bring these home and update them here. Shouldn't take too long, but it saves me the time doing them at work.

My poor garage is semi-flooded. I've really been trying to knock all the major ice off my car before pulling it into the garage, but each morning when I go out there's a mini-flood in the garage from melted ice from the car. I'll have to trash some of the cardboard boxes that are sitting in water right now. Everything that I care about not damaging is up off the floor, but some things are wet. Still, a semi-flooded garage is better than scraping ice and snow off a car as it defrosts in the morning.

My cats don't appreciate snow either. Here's Addy checking it out. Neither of them has ever stepped into snow, although Addy walked out on it this week when it was just solid ice out there.

Guess that's it for now.