before you ask, yes i had a pretty good time on my vacation. i bought a bunch of new records, lost $65 on slot machines, & just generally hung out, relaxing. everything was fine... except for the flights. the day of my departure we got a call from american airlines saying my flights through chicago were cancelled, rerouting me through dallas/ft worth & leaving me stuck there for 3 or so hours while awaiting my connecting flight. while i was stranded in texas (a nightmare even before i'd heard of gw bush) i had dinner at the chili's restaurant in the airport, sat around outside smoking (among the dfw airport's many flaws is a lack of a smoking lounge), & didn't really do much else. the weather was nice, though. so imagine my surprise when my return flight out of dallas was cancelled due to freezing rain. they booked on a later flight, one that sat on the runway 4 hours waiting to be deiced before we could finally depart. & as hard as it is to believe, we were among the lucky. we were one of the few flights that made it out of dallas that day.

so i got back to the midwest & it was much the same. the snowy season is in full effect. according to meteorologists, we're well below the average temperature & notably above the average snowfall for this time of year. not only do we get a white xmas, but also a white chanukah, a white advent, a white ramadan, & white roads.

every day the news tries to frighten us about how horribly slick the roads are. they tell us of accidents, hypothermia deaths, trucks sliding off the road, planes falling from the sky (true!), & more, all the while playing down the fact that most of the bad stuff is happening out in the middle of nowhere, 100 miles or more from town.

it snows at least a little every day, just enough to give the snowplow teams an excuse for not having totally clear roads. it's windy, they say, so even when they plow the snow is blown back on the streets. it keeps snowing, they say, so even when they plow more snow just accumulates in their wake. apparently they've even made the excuse that because public schools are on vacation, they had no need to plow residential roads (because those buses don't have to drive on them). maybe these are good excuses & maybe they're not. all i know is that even on a day like today when the roads were relatively clear, they weren't as good as they could be.

the icy roads themselves aren't what really frightens me. i've never had an at-fault winter accident, or even any winter accident related to poor road conditions (i was rear-ended by a college girl tuning her radio last year, but that was her fault, not old man winter's). what frightens me is the other drivers. i know how to drive; that doesn't bother me. i even know how to drive on moderately icy roads. it's the other people who scare me. many of them don't seem to know how to drive even on clear roads, on sunny days, in the most idyllic utopian weather. so add a little more risk & suddenly they all become deathtraps. i actually feel more safe driving around at night, when the snow is actually falling, because there's so many fewer objects i could potentially run into. there are no tailgaters or light-runners or other wackos.

winter driving isn't really that hard with a front-wheel-drive car that runs (which kaput! surprisingly has so far). i can even narrow it down to 3 basic rules which have served me well, even without abs brakes or airbags or a sack of kitty litter in the trunk. 1) drive slowly. i tend to speed the rest of the year, & even in winter when the roads are okay. but speeding, or even going the speed limit, is pretty silly when your tires are resting on an inch of ice. 2) brake lightly. slamming on the brakes in winter is asking for your wheels to slip. don't do it unless you will clearly hit something if you don't. but if you brake slowly, chances are they won't lock, & you'll eventually coast to a comfortable stop. the same goes for accelerating after a stop. 3) brake early. i mean way early, much earlier than you normally would. brake like an old person, starting a 1/2 block or more from the intersection (depending on your velocity). brake like i had to when my brakes were weak early this year. these rules, along with the techniques you should've learned in driver's ed (though it seems like nobody else ever took such a class) are all you should need to know.

i suppose we could have it worse. i was talking to a friend in wisconsin after the first big snowfall & he told me they'd gotten 14" of snow at once (we had around 6" that time). actually, i believe the exact quote was "fuck you, we got fourteen inches, & i still had to go to work at ups the next day." i'm not sure i would know how to drive on 14" of snow. that's when you start needing chains or other weird accessories that i'm not really familiar with. then again in wisconsin, they're used to that.

so even though the solstice isn't for a few more days, we're in the middle of a winter storm front. winter has begun regardless what the calendar says. i never really understood how the solstices (solsti?) & equinoxes (equini? equinoci?) were supposed to be the first day of their respective seasons, anyway. if the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, & winter is categorized by cold weather & short daylight, wouldn't that make the solstice the middle of winter, as opposed to the beginning? it gets cold before the solstice. hell, we had a white thanksgiving this year, if i remember correctly. maybe i just never paid enough attention in geology class, or astronomy, or whatever you would learn that in (maybe i never paid enough attention to my curriculum to even know what class is which) but i never fully grasped that. maybe there's a valid scientific answer that i never learned because i never asked the right person. or maybe the solstices were just made up the calendar people (which could be interpreted to mean hallmark, the mayans, or just about anyone) as an excuse to party hard 4x a year.