Driving Blues

We've had a crazy mild winter here so far.  More often than not, it's above freezing, and outside of a couple of flurries, we haven't had snow that really stuck.  Today is the first "real" snow and I live with a bunch of wimps.  Granted, it was above freezing the past few days so the ground is relatively warm.  The first snow would have melted, and the temperature will be dropping all day so it froze.  So ice under snow is pretty bad to drive in.  But it's 2 freaking centimeters of snow.  Not even an inch.

Guess how long my drive to work took?  It is 44 km from driveway to parking lot.  27 miles for my non-metric readers.  Granted it's mostly on a slow moving highway across the top of Toronto, my drive in usually takes between 45 minutes and an hour.  35 on a really good day.

So you'd think, maybe 1.5 times as long, I mean, it's not even an inch of snow.  An hour and a half sound right?

Nope.  No accidents on my side of the highway to further complicate the drive.  There was one accident, a bus (not bug if you read this before I fixed that) hit an SUV about 600m from my house, it wasn't much of a hold up to get around it.  One car on the highway pulled over, another being hooked up to a tow truck, neither blocking lanes.  West bound had quite a few accidents, but none on my side.

Maybe twice as long.  Two hours?  No, you're not right either.

Two and a half hours.  Yep.  This is why I work from home when the first flake hits the ground.  I feel like a wimp doing that, but 2.5 hour commute is ridiculous.  I would have, but I moved a meeting yesterday because of the car issues and I felt bad doing that two days in a row.  Sometimes you just have to show up.

I figure that you can't move faster than the car ahead of you, so why bother getting upset?  I did make it to work safely, I enjoyed listening to music in Mr. Lina's car (he wisely stayed home so I took the car with better tires), and played the "what if I won the lottery" game in my head.  I have to say, it's easier with a piece of paper where I can keep track of where the magic money is going.  First thing first, I'd quit and move so I didn't have to do that drive.

And in non-weather complaint news...

Half a day into wearing my grey skirt.  Very happy.  The waist is snug and comfortable when sitting so maybe this is the right amount of ease.

Corin Raymond got us into doing house concerts, he was our first show as half of The Undesirables, then he came back to so his solo work.  Corin is going to be recording a new live album with his band of Sundowners in a couple of weeks.  He found out the recording studio where they plan on doing all the post production accepts Canadian Tire money on par.  For the non-Canadians in the audience, CT is a bit like a cross between Home Depot without lumber but including car repair.  Camping stuff, small appliances, paint, plumbing, gardening, sporting goods, some have gas stations, it's like they have a little bit of everything.  You are given Canadian Tire money when you pay with cash or earn it on your CT credit card.  Five cents here, 10 cents there, it kind of collects.  Well, Corin is on a mission to pay for as much of this recording in CT money as he can.  He made it on the cover to two Toronto newspapers yesterday, at least two television news broadcasts, Canadian Tire actually tweeted about him.  It's crazy.  Follow the saga here.  I know how expensive it is to do a recording right, where the perfomers all get paid rather than just helping a friend (which is nice, but doesn't feed them), where the art looks professional, the music sounds good.  Artists go into debt for to make it, then slowly sell them off to repay only to go into debt for the second album.  This is such a great way to get fan support from money they really didn't have a plan for anyhow.  I counted up our CT money and it's just shy of $30.  Those little bills add up.  We'll be passing them along to Corin on the 25th for the second day of taping.