Thursday, December 22, 2005

Oooooh, sparkly!

After just thinking how un-Christmas-y I've been feeling lately, I was leaving for work this morning - wearing my cute red and white strip-ed elf hat* - and, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a glittering white winter wonderland - no, it's not snow, I live in Georgia, not Massachusettes, it was frost; sparkly, sugary white frost, as far as the eye could see**. I was mesmerized** . My whole car was even glittering in the morning sun... Oh crap, my whole car was glittering in the morning sun, meaning that it was covered in frost.

Having lived in warmer climates most of my life, I wasn't sure what to do. I tried turning on the windshield wipers with no result past a soft scraping sound.

I tried to scrape it off with a cd case, but succeeded in nothing more than a couple of scratches in the ice.

So I had the brilliant idea to run back inside and get a class of warm water to pour onto it - smart, right?

Well, I was already running a little late, so instead of waiting for the water in the sink to warm up, I reasoned that the water coming out of the tap would be warmer than the ice, thus able to do a proper job of melting it, right?

And it worked brilliantly... for about 14 seconds, then a thicker, more resistant layer of ice replaced the first sparkly pretty layer of ice.

Instead of going back into the house, I decided to just sit in the car and hope that the defroster would work better than any of my other idea. Five bone-chilling minutes later, the ice had melted enough for me to almost see through it, so I made my way to work, with all the windows down (because they were frozen, too)

By the time I got to work, my nipples, fingers and toes were all frostbitten and fell off. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but I think it involves owning an ice scraper or living somewhere tropical.

* the only problem with said strip-ed hat is that, no matter how hot my head gets, I won't be able to take it off because I'll have elf hat hair

** okay, across my whole yard

*** as usual when I see something sparkly