Waiting for frozen rain in Durham, NC

Most of Durham is closed. The hospitals are working under various emergency plans. Not that disaster has struck. Severe cold strikes central North Carolina just often enough for bureaucracies to have contingency plans but not often enough to justify having fleets of snow plows and salt trucks.

Tonight we'll be waiting to see if the icy rain predicted for tonight solidifies on power lines and tree limbs eventually brining them tumbling down. Times like this make me wish I were back in San Francisco, a city that can hardly be said to have weather.

Even if we lose electricity at home it may stay on at my used bookshop. Plenty of ecommerce to catch up on, books to be cataloged and scanned. We did sleep there once during the Big Freeze of 2002.

It is the winter of 2002 that has folks of Durham fretting. Myself included. Losing power for days or weeks makes you much more fearful of living through it again. My preceding years in North Carolina were free of weather worries, though an occasional hurricane does make it to the middle of the state.

Hopefully tonight won't bring disaster and we'll get where we can take icy rain more calmly.