20 January 2000

Well, no one wrote to say whether they liked my story fragment, except for K.T., who wrote to tell me I should use the word said instead of greeted, returned, answered, chided, protested, wheedled, and promised. (She didn't actually list all those for me; I just now did it myself. It does seem like too many special tags for such a short snippet of story.)

She also said some things to try to make me feel better (though I wasn't feeling bad, but that's the way of best friends, I suppose - better to comfort too often than not enough) and to defend her grammar. She tells me that in a finished, edited work, her grammar is just fine - that it's not so great in her journal because there she wants to write the way she talks. Well, I suppose I can understand that, since I do it myself to some extent. I guess I've just never seen much from her in the way of "finished work."

At any rate, no one else said anything good or bad about it, which I'll take to mean that it was a fairly mediocre bit of science fiction and that if I intend to add to it, I'd better keep it to myself until it's finished.

Snow, snow, wonderful snow!

When the radio-alarm turned itself on this morning, the DJ's were reading a list of all the school systems that are closed or running late today. (Keep in mind that this is coastal Virginia. We're lucky if we get three snowfalls a year, and each county only has one snowplough, so a pathetic inch of snow is enough to shut the safety-obsessed schools down. When I was in school, we used to make jokes about taking a sack of flour to the superintendant's house.) There's about two - maybe three - inches of snow on the ground, and it's still falling! It's very heavy, wet snow, so it's sticking to everything. It's absolutely beautiful.

I tried to take some pictures of our house this morning - first real snow, and all that - but it was so dark, I had to use the flash. That's when I discovered the snow was still falling; the flash didn't make it to the house for catching on the snowflakes in the air. The pictures are pretty, but don't show the house very well. I brought my camera to work and took some pictures of the trees around my building, which turned out better simply because it's lighter now. The sun should be fully up now, but it looks just barely past dawn. I guess the cloud cover is pretty heavy.

Unfortunately, the weatherman says it's going to turn to rain later today, which means all the lovely snow will wash off before the sun comes out and makes it really pretty. Also, it will make the roads completely insane. No one here knows how to drive in snow. There are essentially three kinds of snow-drivers around here:

• The timid drivers who, if they have to go out at all, creep along at 10 miles an hour. These are actually the best snow drivers in the area.
• The drivers who get impatient with the timid drivers and think that all they have to do is take the wet road into account. The fact that only half their tires are actually touching pavement doesn't make any difference with them, nor the possibility of black ice. These people are dangerous.
• And worst of all, people who used to live somewhere with regular snow, who think they know how to handle it. They drive slower than the impatient people, but zip around the timid drivers, and then they start feeling smug and superior because they know how to drive on snow, and - as they say - pride goeth before a fall. Or in more cases, a slide into the ditch.

Me? I fall somewhere between the second two cases. When I was living in Blacksburg, which had an actual winter, I managed to handle my car fairly well most of the time. I only got stuck once, and that had more to do with an inch-thick coat of ice on the parking lot and the 45-degree hill I had to drive up to get out of that parking lot. After three tries and a backslide almost into the tree in the middle of the lot, I gave up and slid my car back into its parking space (more or less) and called the office. So I did, in fact, once know how to drive in snow and ice, at least a bit. So I'm slightly more cautious than to assume it's the same as driving in the rain, but not much.

Actually, what's fun at the moment is watching people pull into the parking lot and try to figure out where the dividing lines are. Having played that game myself about an hour ago, I know what it's like. (Just to brag, when I got out of my car and scraped a stripe of snow off the ground with my foot, I was almost perfectly lined up. The fact that there's a tree to use as a guiding post had nothing to do with it.)