It's driving me crazy

For the past two mornings, my commute to the office has been anything but pleasurable. Normally it's a 70 mile per hour breeze that takes about 35 minutes if I encounter a couple of red lights along the way.

Yesterday, however, was different. Traffic crawled at about 30 miles per hour as the snowplows decided to clear the highway in the middle of rush hour at 7:30 AM. I followed, along with an increasingly large number of cars, for about 20 miles as the plow flung up streams of powdery snow in the sub-zero air causing near-zero visibilities.

After that ordeal, I figured that the remaining ten miles would be simple. Nine of them actually were. That was until I encountered about half a dozen vehicles in the ditch with tow trucks working and traffic coming to a sudden stop. A sudden stop wouldn't normally be a problem except for the fact that the snow was melting under the heat of the traffic causing black ice. Encountering this led me to start sliding. I applied my death grip to the steering wheel and tried to keep my dozen year-old car in one lane as I noticed the blue mini van beginning to dance in its lane as we quickly came upon total gridlock right at my exit.

I am surprised I wasn't hit because the ditch was not an option as it was already occupied and the shoulder was home to a two truck. After my closest call in a dozen years of driving I can proudly say that I lived to make the exact same drive again today. But that's a different story.