The Day After

Well, here I am, still alive. The lying buggers at the Swedish weather office. It was nowhere NEAR -30 deg C yesterday. 20, maybe. But certainly not 30. Mind you, they did get the rest of it pretty well right. If that was my first true arctic blizzard, then I'll be quite happy for it to be my last. I have to confess, that I always wondered what it would be like, to experience a real winter. The last 2 have been relatively tame. In hindsight, I probably should have stuck to wondering. First mistake for the day was in driving to work. I had a few errands to run, but, if ever there was a day to take the bus, yesterday was that day. It was actually ok driving in on the motorway. A couple of dodgy areas where the wind was blasting snow across the road. But manageable. What I didn't know was that the real storm wasn't to arrive for another hour. Being the tight-wad that I am, I don't park inside parking buildings. Not at 10kr an hour. Nope, it's always been the outdoor parking place for me. 3kr an hour I can live with. Yesterday, again in hindsight, it wasn't my smartest decision. By the time I got back to the trusty Volvo at 4pm, I had to dig around in the snow drift to find the door handle. I kid you not. Now, there's a reason why everyone in Sweden owns a Volvo. And it's not for their looks. It's because they work. No matter what, they go. And keep on going. I've owned 4 wheel drive Subarus, and a Landrover. So I was pretty skeptical about the ability of a simple front wheel drive car in a climate like this. But this car starts in a flash and goes exactly where you point it. Every time. Man, I was glad of it yesterday. As I crawled through town, I passed a guy stopped in the middle of a major intersection. He was lying in the snow, frantically trying to dig his Mercedes Benz out of the snow. "Buy a Volvo", I muttered smuggly. Sure, you instantly age 20 years on the inside, the moment you sit in a Volvo. But when you're driving up the motorway at night, through 30cm deep snow, at 90kph, it's blowing and snowing like buggery outside, and it's 22 degrees inside the car, who gives a shit. It probably deserves a bath this weekend, I reckon.