That's a Wicked Googly
Michigan in winter is just like Australia, except instead of creatures trying to kill you every second, it's the weather.Exhibit A:
That's ice, so thick that when I lowered my window, it decided to stay. That's what's been happening here the last two days--ice storms--after 15" of snow last week melted into a sodden mess.
1/4" of solid ice. That's a lot.
How did I get to my car? Our driveway is sloped, so I literally stood in place and just coasted down to the driver side door, where I grabbed the handle and hung on for dear life.
Exhibit B:
That's the power outage map. All those colors are bad. About 60,000 people in the map area didn't have power yesterday. Now it's over 100,000 and climbing.
It's going to be 10 degrees tonight. This is the weather literally trying to kill us.
We've lost power twice in the last two days, but only for an hour each time (there's no way we escape the colored labyrinth today, though. It's going to get us, at some point.). Eli 17.6 got two more school holidays, because the school hasn't had power for almost 48 hours. He's had 9 days off from school in the last 5 weeks.
Why is this happening? The ice has caused thousands of branches to snap off old, huge trees. That's downed power lines, plus the sheer weight of the ice has downed quite a few more.
Exhibit C: Snowshoes.
I don't have a picture for this one, but I snowshoed last week in about 15" of fresh, powdery snow.
I managed to do two laps around a track, so half a mile. I've rarely been so exhausted. It felt like an equivalent effort to sprinting, just to move forward at any pace, because the snow was so deep.
Now I know why Shackleton didn't make it.
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