My Sunday snow experience... a.k.a. Illinois sucks sometimes

Let's start this post out by saying that it is the end of March. This just adds to the ridiculousness that was life yesterday.

So, there was forecasted snow for pretty much most of yesterday and through the night, but I wasn't expecting much. You know how the weather report can be. They usually over-exaggerate here and there and are off a lot of the time, so I figured, hey, 4-6 inches? Probably more like 3. And even then, 4-6 inches is not that bad.

Let me tell you, they grossly under-exaggerated. Here's what it looked like when I got up around 9 am.

This is literally all that fell overnight. I took Nick to work at 11 and went straight to the gym. It was barely even flaking snow from the sky. When I left the gym around noon, the flakes were a bit bigger, but the ground was still wet and nothing was sticking. I thought, "sweet, it really won't be that bad today." Fast forward to me getting ready for work and not even looking outside before I left and then opening the front door to a blanket of probably at least 3 inches already. Keep in mind this was around 12:45 and I got home from the gym around 12:15. In 30 minutes, the temperature clearly dropped a bit and it just dumped snow. Now, it's Sunday, so plows aren't really going to be out, not to mention, that snowfall accumulated really fast, so the roads were terrible. I had to drive soooo slow and still slid around! At this point, life looked a bit like this:

I'm talking a white-out situation. I mean, you couldn't see street lights until you were fairly close to them. No bueno.

So I worked for a few hours and we were fairly slow, which was all well and good. Then I had to leave to go home. I had only been at work 4 hours, so my car wasn't covered in snow that badly, but the piles around it made it very difficult to get out. Thankfully, a nice man was there and helped push me out of my spot so I could get going. The roads were still absolute crap because it had been snowing constantly since it started, and everything turned to slush and a little bit of ice since it was wet before the temp dropped and it reallly started to snow. So I'm driving along in the left lane that has more slushy "tracks" cut out of it, but it's kinda bumpy, and I'm gonna have to turn right eventually, so I decide to get over (even though I can't see at all out of my back windshield). Well, I did this much too soon, and in the right lane, which was a little more icy, I hid a little slippery patch and my car's butt started sliding right and then I got stuck on the side of the road. Then, my life looked like this:

[So so sad]

I called Nick, because he was waiting for me to pick him up from work at Walgreen's, and told him my great news. He started walking in my direction (I was seriously so close but so far haha), but thankfully my boss had caught up to me, realized that the sad little stuck car was mine, and called me and said he could pick Nick up for me. Yay! So I just sat and watched cars whip past me (people are idiots in weather like this) and not even look at me to see what was going on. My faith in humanity was restored when a truck pulled over in front of me and a younger guy got out to see what was up. I told him I had someone on the way, but he grabbed the other guy in his truck and they pushed me out. Thank the Lord. Buuuut I still had a ways to go considering the weather, and I hadn't gotten very far when a van spun across the lane in front of me. Good thing I was going, like, 10 miles an hour.

So I finally get to Nick and we switch places (thank God), and we then get to the challenge of getting into our building's little parking lot. Which still hadn't been cleared. We decided, hell, let's just go for it! Because parking on the street would probably be worse and I'd rather have my car under it's little car port then out in the weather. That wasn't the best idea though, because the snow was soooo deep, and we got stuck. Again. Thankfully our neighbor was coming out to take out trash,a nd she helped us push the car in, but not after about 15-20 minutes of literally kicking out a path for the car and also kicking snow out from underneath the car and around the tires. We almost hit her car, which is next to ours in the lot, but we finally got it in, and thankfully she didn't seem to mind that almost happening a few times, haha.

I have never been so happy to be home. We immediately changed into warm comfy clothes and made some drinks. We needed it, obviously. Our friend Andrew came over and we decided to have a LOTR marathon, and then, since snow is much more enjoyable when you don't have to drive in it, we decided to go out and run around in it a bit. Because, no matter how much snow sucks when you're an adult and actually have to function in it, nothing can take away that feeling you got when you were a kid and got to play in the snow. Plus, it's just so peaceful when the snow stops falling and everything is quiet. So life was a little better then. Scratch that, much better then, and I had fun making tracks in fresh snow :) It looked kinda like this:

[My car, Sylvia, all tucked away nicely]

The end.