Insert the Vanilla Ice song title of your choice into this headline

My life may not be perfect, but my commute is: 1.2 miles from door to door.

Yesterday, it took me over half an hour to get home.

Thank goodness I had gone home for lunch. I arrived back at work at about a quarter to one. Shortly after that, my office announced it would close at 3:00 due to the weather. So my car was sitting in the parking lot for just over two hours. When I got out there, it was encased in a block of ice. Woolly mammoth fossils have been discovered in less ice than this. It took several minutes to open the driver’s side door so I could get the ice scraper and start the defroster going.

The side windows weren’t so bad, but the windshield was just impossible. Scraping back and forth, I looked like a man selling sno-cones. All I needed were those little bottles of flavoring. I stopped scraping and started hitting the ice, yelling at it to go away. When that didn’t work, I gave up and sat in my car for a little while, and tried to calculate how long it would take for the defroster to do its job. I figured ten, maybe fifteen years.

After some time, I saw that the defroster had made a little leeway at the bottom of the windshield, so I got out and started there, and managed to make some progress. Ten minutes later I could finally see through most of my windshield. Good enough.

So, yay!, I could drive home. My happiness was short lived: All the traffic lights were out. This wasn’t a serious problem until I got to Route 1, a fairly busy road. Did they have a traffic cop there, keeping order? No. Someone had placed stop signs in each road leading to the intersection — that was supposed to do the trick. By the time I got there, half the stop signs had been knocked over. Drivers on Route 1 didn’t look like they planned to stop for any reason short of Armageddon.

I weighed my options. It would be easiest to turn right. Alas, that would also take me further away from my house. No, I had to either turn left or go straight. A gap appeared in the traffic that I wouldn’t have considered on a normal day, but today I flung myself into it and hoped for the best. I got across the street and was now in my own development. Ahhh! Nothing could possibly go wrong now.

I made a left on to the street perpendicular to my own and was reminded that this street happens to be a fairly steep hill. My car got halfway up and then began sliding back down. Not a lot — I wasn’t in freefall — but I was definitely going in the wrong direction.

I instinctively reached for the gearshift, as if I was driving an Italian sports car instead of a Honda Civic with an automatic transmission. What was I going to do, throw the car into reverse? Neutral? No, I was going to do what drivers like me always did in situations like this: Floor it.

It worked, somehow. The tires managed to grab hold of something and propelled the car up the hill. The street was unplowed and I could hear the bottom of the car scraping against the snow and ice. I expected I could soon look down between my feet and see the road itself. That wouldn’t be so bad: If anything further went wrong, I could just pedal home like Fred Flintstone.

The electricity was still going in my neighborhood — perhaps you heard my sigh of relief – so I was able to put my car in the garage. I got myself inside, took off my shoes, sat on the sofa and announced in a loud voice, “I AM NOT GOING TO THE GYM.”

Update: Of course, some people had it just a little bit worse.