So it turns out there’s this blog called “BaLtiMoRe RoLL“, and there was like this blogger “meet up” and they had beer (mmmmmm, beer…) and of course I only find out about this blog and this opportunity to get drunk AFTER it happens.

Life hates me.*

*And so does that asshole who was following me on ice-coated Timonium Road tonight! And I hate you back, buddy!

Kickass!

So tonight, Maryland got its first snowfall of the winter.

I was working when it started, and at first it wasn’t too bad - just a light dusting of the white stuff which magically clears the road of most traffic and doubles a person’s average tip. Cheerio, and thank you, sir!

But it started getting worse, and when I nearly spun out at the intersections of Paper Mill and Phoenix Road, I knew my deliveries were over. Back at the store I knocked out my chores and was free to go.

That was at nine o’clock. I think, in the final judgement, my wrong decision was to head home via Jarrettsville Pike, with the intention of taking that to Dulaney Valley Road, then taking Timonium Rd. home. Because while both Jarrettsville Pike and Dulaney Valley were pretty well and plowed, Timonium Road was a sheet of ice. Cars were all over the place, mostly on the side of the road. The roads heading into Cockeysville — and my apartment — all lead up hills. All of them. Pot Spring, Rutledge, Padonia, Bosley & Cranbrook.

My original hope had been to make a right on Pot Spring, and take that to Cranbrook. Nope. A car was slipping backwards down the hill. Rutledge wasn’t as bad, but there was a car with flashers on stopped dead center on the hill, so I wasn’t going to try for it. I had one last hope — continue on Timonium and hope York Road was clear. If so, I might be able to hit Padonia.

Well, that concept died when I turned onto Padonia Road — there was in fact a long line of cars with parking brakes applied lining away from Padonia Station and up the damn hill. I should point out at this point that my apartment building is directly off Padonia Road, just past its intersection with Cranbrook.

I only had one chance — the hope that Cranbrook Road had been salted. This was also a gamble - of all the hills mentioned, Cranbrook has the steepest climb. After seeing the impassibility of Pot Spring and Rutledge, I’d been hoping to be saved by Padonia — my hopes on that, of course, had been dashed.

I cut through a parking lot to avoid getting stuck on Padonia, and took Greenside out to Cranbrook. There was a Wrangler ahead of me, and a beat up Civic beside me as we all began our trek up Cranbrook.

And lo’! What should appear, but a mighty plow, spilling salt behind it as it came down the hill? And what was that reflecting in my headlights? SALT! It had been salted! Thankfully, I realized that I wouldn’t have to spend the night shivering in my car in the McDonald’s parking lot! From seeing the truck to pulling into my apartment’s parking lot took about ten minutes whereas it usually — depending on how fast I’m driving, how many cops are on patrol, and whether I hit both lights or not — takes two.

I have never been so happy to be home.

Also: to the cockwhoring motherfucking sack of shit piece of fuck who decided to drive FOUR INCHES OFF MY ASS while I was heading for York Road, FUCK YOU SHIT BRAIN. Yes, you have an SUV, but did no one point out to you that YOUR SUV’s brakes work about as well on ice as MINE do?

UPDATE:

Last night, Zenchick “spent a harrowing TWO HOURS in the car driving a total of 20 miles (a great portion of which was on Interstate 95), in gear 2, with my hazard lights on, on a dusting of snow over a sheet of glistening ice.”

I-95, even on a sunny clear day, should be avoided. Tis the plague.

Instapundit has “noticed the same thing” in reference to an article by Christian Victim James Lileks.

And then they both get a well deserved smack down from James Wolcott.

This “fear of Christmas” is a phantom menace conjured every year so that certain crybaby Christians can adopt victim status and model a pained expression over the sad fact that not everyone around them isn’t carrying on like the Cratchits. This thin-skinned grievance-collecting gives birth to all sorts of urban legends and rumors about big institutions being hostile to Christ’s birthday, such as the one that swirled on WOR radio last week about how Macy’s employees had been instructed not to say “Merry Christmas!” to shoppers. A fiction that was put to rest when the host hit Macy’s website and saw its “Merry Christmas” greeting, and Macy’s employees chimed in over the phones to say there was no such policy. To read conservative pundits, you’d think everybody was wishing each other Happy Kwanzaa! and averting their eyes from oh so gauche Nativity scenes. I’ve got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin.

Norbizness suggests that Lilek’s “wah-wah” attitude is in part because “the store clerk is either Jewish or, on closer inspection, is one of three or four light-skinned African-Americans in the entire state of Minnesota that celebrates Kwanzaa” but I think the second possible reason is funnier, “the author was attempting to smuggle out of the store’s used plus-sized mannequins by passing it off as his ‘exhausted wife’.”

When you read Conservative bloggers, generally the attitude you get is this bullshit, “Oh, we hate lefties because they’re so PC to everybody BUT US, dammit, we want some of the PC love so we can reject it. Also, we feel insecure about ourselves and so that plus our desire to push forward an unconstitutional and unAmerican plan to integrate religion and government we’re going to start a campaign to make Christians victims of that bad PC movement that is PC to everyone but conservatives. Wah. Why won’t anyone love me?”

Really, it just makes the dead roll over in their graves, and sends anyone with half a brain running for the toilet so they don’t retch all over their new Star Trek Season Two DVD set.