Holed Up
Here in Sunny East Lansing, we're finally getting our first real snow of the 2009-2010 winter season. We got just enough snow last night so that I had a slushy walk to work this morning. Now, temperatures are dropping and all the slush from this morning is being replaced with a lighter, fluffier snow. The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm warning from 7:00pm through 4:00pm tomorrow. Temperatures are supposed to dip down into the teens. Gotta love it!
I have gotten into the habit of filling up my gas tank (or at least topping it off) on Wednesday evenings. From what I have seen, local gas prices fluctuate through the week so that they are usually highest on the weekends and lowest at the middle of the week. If I don't have any other activities going on, I'll still make sure to run out and fill up after work on Wednesdays. Tonight, however, I don't feel like doing it. The roads aren't that bad with snow yet, but I don't want to get my car all dirty.
The last time I took my car out for a spin was Sunday night. It had a thin film of dirt from wet road spray that had accumulated over the previous couple of weeks. It was pretty dry on Sunday, so I washed it and it stayed as clean as if it had been a clear, sunny day. Afterward, I parked in front of my apartment and it's been there ever since. It got snowed on, but it's still pretty clean. If I take it out now, it will get salt and sand residue all over (and under) it. I'd like to avoid that as much as I can and put off the salt contamination as long as possible. I know that's kind of silly, but Zephyr has so little rust that I'd hate to be overly hard on her. My former car (Gertrude) was already rusting away when I got her, so I hardly cared. She's got half a tank of gas right now so I can probably hold out until next Wednesday.
Even though we had a snow dusting last week, it wasn't enough to test how well (or badly) Zephyr handles on snowy/slushy roads. I have snow tires, but it's such a small car that it might be kind of slippery on icy roads. I recently got some bags of pea gravel from my friend Fran. (She ordered some for landscaping, and didn't realize how much she was getting. She has lots of extra bags in her garage that's she's trying to get rid of.) I went over to her place and put four bags of the stuff in my trunk. Each bag holds 0.5 cubic feet. They don't say how heavy they are, but they each feel like about 50lbs. Hopefully the extra 200lbs of weight in my car will keep her from sliding around in the snow.
