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A winter storm system came through the area about a week and a half ago, and dumped a bunch of ice all over the place. I think the official count ended up around a gagillion inches of ice, but don’t quote me on that. The temperatures have been above freezing for quite a while since then, and I’m only just now starting to see the ground again.

The roads are still about 20% narrower than they should be, but I can drive places without skidding into the middle of a four-way intersection and almost impaling my car on a trailer hitch. And not just a normal trailer hitch; the kind of hitch that was designed to move entire chains of those pre-manufactured houses. How such an artifact ended up on the tail end of a Ford Ranger is anybody’s guess, although I imagine it has something to do with defective thinking on the part of a certain Ford Ranger owner.

Anyway, my ice-plus-car tales don’t end with a mere near-impalement. When I tried to leave my parking space for the first time after the storm, my tires were literally frozen to the pavement. The car refused to move in the way it usually does when I press the appropriate petal, although the tires did plenty of spinning. In the midst of their fruitless revolutions, somehow one of the treads kind of ripped, and the entire front driver’s-side tire was flat within an hour or so.

Have you ever tried to hand-jack a car and replace a tire when the automobile is resting on an estimated gagillion inches of ice? It’s a pretty fantastic time, let me tell you. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, my advice is to use liberal amounts of hot water to melt key ice patches. And liberal amounts of girlfriend to help you keep your frustration in check. And liberal amounts of that ice-melting rock salt stuff to track through your apartment when you get the water. Tracking salt through your house is a very critical phase of the process, trust me.

There were some good parts to the whole thing, though. I didn’t have to go to work for a day and a half. Plus, you know… all that free ice… usually you have to pay for that stuff.