Part One, In Which We Push Cars and Contemplate Suicide

There are probably 30,000-ish people in the southern seven counties of Illinois. Although we all experienced my ice storm...screw 'em. It's my blog, so this is my story.

Monday I was a good little housebutch. I finally took the last of the Christmas decorations down to the shed, stored the tires from the ill-fated blue truck, and I started the laundry. I was standing in the yard at 11-ish talking with Carrie when it started to lightly snow. "Crap.", says I. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get to work.

By 1 o'clock, however, it wasn't a pain in the ass, it was impossible. I scraped and chipped the ice off my truck at the top of my driveway...and then stopped and scraped again at the bottom. I made it a mile into town before I stopped to scrape a third time...then I turned back and called in.

Yay! No work on a Monday!

I called Lori at work and told her to come home now, before she ended up spending the night in town, and got busy collecting firewood. Mountains of firewood. I thought that would last us until April at least. We congratulated ourselves for the weather, then put a movie on and sat down to enjoy our unexpected vacation.

We alternately watched "Gandhi" and watched the ice and rain falling. At 11 when we went to bed the ice was still falling and Gandhi was still dead. At 11:10, the power went out. We laid in bed, listening to the limbs break, and Lori said, "I hope the branches don't fall on the cars.

Well, okay. Guess who got up 7,000 times in the night to see if the exploding trees had landed on the cars? The crack of the trees breaking and falling became my nocturnal obsession. Every 10 minutes another tree fell, and ever 10 minutes plus one second I shot out of bed to stare presbyopically out the window for squished cars and/or trucks.

Finally the sun came up, and no cars were squished. An inch of ice coated everything and an enormous limb had landed 5 feet behind Lori's car, but we were in good shape. We boiled coffee water on the stove (Yay for gas stoves!), put on all the clothes we owned, and headed out into the yard.

The next door neighbor (Remember him? Lives with his dead parents behind a wall of unkempt grass and trees?) had a backyard that sounded like a war zone. Every few minutes one of his 40 foot tall trees exploded and fell over. We stood in our yard and watched in awe until we figured out that several of the exploding trees were precariously balanced over Lori's car.

We decided to move the car. After 10 minutes of spinning tires fruitlessly on ice, I decided to kill myself by wedging my head into the crotch of one of the neighbor's trees and waiting for it to explode. I figured, "Hey! I'm a lesbian. I'm all about wedging my head in crotches!"

Yeah, it would be chilly for a while, but not too much chillier than one of my exes, and the tree wouldn't call me at work later to tell me that I'm an asshole and it never wanted to see me again, but if it ever did, would I stop and pick up Chinese food on my way home? And fill up it's gas tank? And take it's trash cans down to the curb? And then go to hell, because I'm still an asshole and the tree still hates me?

So we crammed a lot of crap under the car tires until me, Carrie, and her Man Friend were able to push it across the field and onto a patch of gravel. Then we trudged home to fire up the chainsaw and start cutting up more trees.

Oh...and I hate Big Brother...which is why I'm blogging now and not in the morning, like the good lord intended. However Big Brother is almost over, CSI is about to start, and I'll finish my adventure story in the morning.