So it snowed a little bit today, but mostly it was cold and rainy. When I went to the store, I had to pull over because rain was falling on the windshield and immediately sticking, to the point that after a couple of miles, I couldn’t see anymore. I ended up turning on defrost to the maximum. By the time we got the store, Lain and I were both sweating and she was crying from the heat. But I could see!
That’s not actually the story that this post is about. The story is…
So Clancy is spending the night at a neighbor’s house. About one tenth of a mile from here. Worry not for the Truman-Himmelreich marriage. She’s there because she can’t get here. She drove up our street, which has an incline, and the car decided that it could go up no further and decided to go back down again.
This is the incline:
She can walk a bit, but for the most part is still on crutches. We decided that she should not tread up an incline that the car could not. So she’s down there.
After putting Lain to sleep, I needed to let the dog out. While the dog was out, I decided I would throw some salt on the driveway. After taking care of the area immediately in front of the house, I decided to see if I could make any progress on this part:
Given the level of ice, you might have some sort of idea what happened next. Sure enough, I lost my balance. No, wait, losing my balance isn’t quite right. What happened was that I started shifting. Surfing, as it were. Except without a board. And on ice and concrete instead of on water. Realizing what was happening, and that there was no stopping it, I decided that the best course of action was a controlled fall, and then laying flat on my back in case I got more traction and to make sure I wouldn’t lose my balance.
Above you see three arrows. The red arrow is was I was when I started. The blue arrow was where I ended up. The green arrow is where the incline was such that Clancy’s car couldn’t make it. In between the blue arrow and the green arrow is apparently a place sufficiently level and/or ice-free (I don’t remember, my mind being distracted by other things) that I didn’t slide all the way to the street below.
Here’s another view, a picture actually taken not far from where I ended up in fact:
When my hands heal, I’ll probably think it’s funny. Under different circumstances, it might have actually been fun. When I was going down, it made me think of those waterslides that you lay on your back and slide down with a gush of water. Except, once again, ice instead of water. And a driveway instead of a tube.
Sorry dude…Report
Hey, this came out a lot better than it could have. No harm, no foul (other than the hand, which will heal quickly, I think).Report
Man, between this and the staircase incident, I’m starting to think gravity has it in for your ass and you need to get low and stay there.
Have you considered living underground, an abandoned missile silo perhaps?Report
That I have twice, in the fewer-than-six-months I have lived here, found myself in a position to think “Okay, I’m going to fall, so I need to figure out how best to avoid serious injury…” is not a good sign.
And I’m not even the one in crutches!Report
Maybe you should take up Judo, if you’re gonna keep submitting to gravity’s harsh embrace.
Learning to fall properly is useful. There are days I think it should be part of PE class for kids. Unlike dodgeball, training someone to fall properly is useful your whole life.Report
Learning to fall properly is useful.
+1. I don’t know how many friends and acquaintances I’ve seen over the years — but a fair number — with an arm in a cast and when you ask, you get “I slipped and tried to break my fall by sticking my hand out with a stiff arm.” OTOH, there’s the time the horse tossed me off on the downhill side of the trail, with all sorts of odd rotations going on, and all I could think of was “This is going to hurt no matter how well I manage the fall.”Report
morat,
of course. But, if you’re going to teach that one, you also ought to teach people how to jump on cars. Far better than falling beneath them.
(Yes, it’s a trained act. part of stunt doubling ).Report
Dodgeball was the only fun part of gym class, but I like Kim’s idea. Learning how to do movie stunts would be even more fun,Report
@morat20
Maybe you should take up Judo, if you’re gonna keep submitting to gravity’s harsh embrace.
Yeah. And then next time you can use gravity’s strength against itself, and throw the earth into the sun!Report
Wow…sorry to hear all this. Do you have those little ice gripper cleats people can put on their shoes?Report
Or wear sneakers? (I’m thinking of this famous championship game.) I feel they give me much better footing than hard shoes.Report
Probably anything would be better than my Caterpillars. You’d think I would have learned after the dreadful error of wearing them to Angel’s Landing.Report
Is there a reason you didn’t walk on the grass and leaves along the side and toss the salt from there? Ice-coated grass is almost always a lot less slick than ice-coated pavement.Report
Southerners. We walk on ice about as well as we drive on it.Report
We walk on ice about as well as we drive on it. [Emphasis mine]
There’s your problem. You don’t walk on ice unless the temperature is way below freezing; you shuffle on it. Ice is a complex substance, and until it gets cold enough (below about -4 °F IIRC), there’s a very thin sort-of-liquid layer on the surface. The presence of impurities in small quantities can increase the thickness of the layer and make it more like actual water. And of course, water on ice does a darned good impression of a frictionless surface. Put your foot on a spot where the layer is thick enough, get your center of mass far enough off-center from that point of contact, and — whoosh!Report
Yeah, it’s rarely my problem, because when it’s icy (as it was for a bit here Saturday morning), I don’t walk anywhere but on carpet, tile, or hardwood.Report
I do it where I can but tree branches make it tough. That was how I got back up to the house, though.Report
This doesn’t seem fun under any circumstance. Winter is the most dangerous of the seasons.Report
Except off the Third Coast, where it’s the most pleasant season of the year.Report
If you mean California, our very pleasant winters come at a cost known as megadrought.
When I first moved here, it was common to have periods of 2-3 weeks where there was nothing but clouds and rain in January and February but this could be punctured with a very nice weekend.Report
I was referring to the southern coast, where the cost is known as “the other nine months of the year.” 🙂Report
R.: It’s 74 and sunny in late January. I love this place.
Me: All I can think of is that in 4 months it will be 102 and sunny, and I will hate this place.Report
When I used to do work trips to the Gulf coast, my co-workers who lived there called it the American Riviera.Report
How’d you get back up the hill? My mind immediately went to you being stuck down at the bottom with Clancy and Lain whooping it up back at home sans supervision!Report
@kazzy On the grass and dirt. Definitely not on the driveway!
Clancy was at the neighbors’ house downhill. Had Lain not been uphill, I might have said “screw it” and joined her. But can’t leave the girl alone, obviously.Report
Is it obvious? Or have I gone way too far with “free range” parenting?Report
I think you misunderstand the meaning of “free range parenting”.
“Dude, you’ve been at the bar six hours now. Don’t you have kids to take care of?”
“Nah man, I’m a free-range parent, s’all good”.
(As an aside, a commenter on an article about some parents who got into hot water for letting their kids walk a mile alone, made the point that it’s stupid that we now have to call such parents “free-range”, implying they are doing something weird or unusual. Once upon a time they would have just been “parents”.)Report
As I’ve said before, my summers were much like crate training. We were fed in the mornings then told to get out of here and go out and play or something and be home by suppertime, as defined by the streetlights turning on (lunch was optional).
We weren’t able to make that many demands on our parents’ time outside of that. The occasional trip to the library, the occasional movie… but if we wanted to spend time with them other than that, it was to tag along with them: the grocery store, the auto mechanic, the barber/hairdresser.
(Things changed, somewhat, after my father passed… we were kept on a somewhat tighter leash. Compared to today, though? Free Range all the way.)Report
Question about that waterslide: is it blue or is it white?Report
Boo. #notalldresses.Report
The episode sounds more humiliating than painful, although I’m sure it didn’t feel good. I can totally see slipping like that myself.Report
That road looks like a kick ass sledding route with either snow or ice!Report