In Honor of the Cold Weather

In honor of the freakishly cold weather in Texas right now, I'm going to tell you a story about another time it was freakishly cold.

Second semester of my senior year, it snowed. Not just a few minutes of hey-is-that-? snow that didn't stick. No, no. Inches came down hard and fast and it stuck.

Again, we are in TEXAS, people. TEXAS, I tell you. Texas, the place where our version of snow is like 1/4 of an inch of ice. We think "real" snow is happy and pretty like the picture to the right. We don't understand that it gets sludge-y and gross and Not. Fun. :( And we definitely don't know how to drive in it.

Yeah, okay, the panhandle gets a lot of snow frequently, but let's face it, they're not really part of Texas. (I'm kidding, Lubbock. KIDDING. Sheesh.)

That morning it had been about 60 degrees out. While most Texans were crying about how it was sooo freezing, I'd sucked it up and worn short sleeves to school because I thought it was going to be warm out by noon. Big mistake.

A cold front moved in, quickly. By noon, there were talks of slight flurries. By 2, school was being let out because a "snowstorm" was going to hit and we were all going to die, omg.

At 2 pm, Mr. Man and I were helping the assistant swim coach with the JV swim team, like we did every day (yes, this was our class. Rock on, right?). Coach saw the weather bulletin a few minutes before two and was like "Go home you two, now."

Well, we were two 17-year-olds with empty houses because our parents were at work until at least 4. You can imagine that we were, ahem, okay with this situation, so instead of taking both our cars to our respective homes like good parental-rules-abiding kids would have, we decided to take only one car. I don't quite remember why we decided to take my little sports car instead of his off-road, all-weather tires Jeep, but when we were on our way to his house, we got stuck going up a hill.

That's right. It is the mass chaos of after-school-traffic in a neighborhood full of kids aged k-12, some of whom are driving in snow for the first time, the school buses were out, and we got stuck. And I still. Didn't. Have. A jacket.

Well, we had to dig the car out. I mean, what else were we going to do? So, we start trying to dig the car out, both without gloves, both wearing canvas shoes that were literally freezing solid. Did I mention that we were in TEXAS (wtf, Texas?!), I didn't have a jacket, and we were on a two-lane dirt/gravel road?

Yeah. After thirty minutes, our hands were effectively the wrong color, more than one person had tried to help unsuccessfully, and suddenly, a bus full of kids got stuck in the lane next to us, slid sideways and very nearly almost took my car off the road with it (not to mention me). We decide to abandon my car (:[!), go to his house, and get a shovel and something warm.

To make an already long story (sorry?) shorter, a huge pick up truck towed the bus out, the traffic cleared up a little and some of Mr. Man's football friends helped us turn the car around, push it out and we took it back to the natatorium. After an hour long ordeal, we were finally in his Jeep with the all-weather tires, soaked to the bone and shivering violently. We went back to his house, where instead of having fun, we worried about the fact that my feet and hands were totally the wrong color and I was slightly out of it. Sweet Mr. Man let me take a hot shower, threw my clothes in the dryer, then let me borrow the warmest clothes he owned and wrapped me in a cocoon of blankets and watched TV with me until I stopped shivering an hour later.

Two days later, it was 80 degrees out. WTF, Texas?