Murphy's Law Morning

The forecast last night said that we might have freezing rain this morning. Of course -- the morning I have to be at school early to teach!

When I left the house this morning, it had just started to rain (again), a "wintery mix" of rain and ice. I decided I'd better grab an umbrella, so I turned to go back in, and the doorknob wouldn't work. (It does this every so often; it gets stuck in the wrong position so you have to open it from the inside to fix it.) I rang the doorbell, but Mike was in the bathroom and couldn't come to the door. So I figured I'd go around back. I started down the steps to the driveway, not realizing that they were completely coated with a thin layer of ice. Woosh! Landed on my rear end and scraped up my hands -- ouch ouch ouch! I made it in the back door, and put on some band-aids and got the umbrella. I made it up to the car without incident, but then the car windows were also covered with a layer of ice. And (living in the South as we do), we didn't have a scraper in the trunk. So back down to the house to try to find the scraper -- which we were not able to do, but fortunately having the defrost on full blast while we were looking melted the ice enough to drive. Of course, by this time, getting to school early as I'd planned was not going to happen!

The roads were fine on my route, fortunately, but the campus sidewalks were not. Just on the entrance road to the parking garage, I saw two people slip and fall, and others were slipping around as I very slowly made my way to class (on time, even). Whew!

My view is that if getting in is that treacherous, the school should cancel or delay classes -- they're lucky no one broke an arm (at least, as far as I know!)

But, it could have been worse. I heard on the radio that police responded to more than 50 car accidents in our area this morning -- mostly minor -- and more than that further west. And it's all melted now, thank goodness.

(We had a somewhat similar chain of events on Friday night. We went out planning to have dinner and a movie, and even picked the restaurant so it would be quick. Well, the server forgot to put in the main part of our order, so we waited and waited before he realized the mistake, and then when we got to the theater, there weren't any seats left for our showing. So we went to the video store. And we got home, and the DVD we'd rented was messed up and wouldn't play! Argh! Niki started out the year in a doom bubble; we seem to be spending some time in an "inconvenience bubble." )