Hospice Nurse Faces Ice Storm Without Deicer

You may think this is a blog post about how I am facing an ice storm without deicer, but in fact it is a blog post about my alien cat. Please do not stop reading. I actually have the world’s most marvelous cat. I rescued her from a patient who, for obvious reasons, needed to find her a new home. The first time I visited the patient, this cat came up to me on the couch and butted her head quite hard against mine in a way that clearly said human, look at me, I’m the world’s most marvelous cat and you should adopt me.

I wanted to take her home at once, but my patient had not at this point mentioned she was trying to find a new home for her. This fact emerged on my second visit, when the cat rolled over on her back at my feet, presenting herself to me as available for prolonged petting. My patient said I’m looking for a home for her, you want her? And thus she became my cat.

Angel Cat is marvelous at all times except first thing in the morning, when I think she might be an alien. I wake to find her staring intently at me from the foot of the bed. If I lie completely still I might get another couple minutes of rest, but as soon as I move any muscle, she deftly walks up my body with her pointy feet and breathes into my nose. Then she headbutts me, jumps off the bed and careens round the house knocking things over. After this brief break with reality, she curls up in a ball by my face and is once again marvelous.

But the ice storm, you exclaim! It is coming, my first ice storm ever. Previously, I have only seen them in movies, such as Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, in which a seemingly wholesome family begins coming apart at the seams over a tumultuous Thanksgiving break. Yes, I am quoting from IMDb. Our ice storm is predicted to begin around 10pm and all day I have been receiving stern warnings from work. Make sure your patients have backup oxygen and enough medications to last them! To last them how long? The ice storm is only forecast until 3am, when it should start raining. Best to have a strong scraper in your car, a fellow nurse wrote, and no harm carrying some deicer.

I read this as dicer. Being a recent transplant from California, where we never have ice storms, I wondered but did not like to ask what dicer is. Eventually my poor Californian brain decoded it as de-icer. I don’t have any, but I was glad I hadn’t asked. This happens to me a lot.

When you move from a warm climate to a cold one, you get a crash course in Winter. Our first here is apparently a doozie. Last year the ploughs were only out a couple of times. This year the entire Hudson Valley has been blanketed in snow for the whole of February. I must say, I’m kind of thrilled to be on Central Hudson’s storm warning mailing list. It’s exciting to learn about the dangers of black ice, the difference between an Ice Storm Warning and a Winter Weather Advisory, and how to stop your windshield from freezing as you drive.

This happened to me today. It was sleeting, but my windshield wipers just spread the sleet into a thin layer of water that immediately froze. My Subaru helpfully flashed up the word EYE-SIGHT with a big X through it, as though I needed to be told that I could no longer see out of my windshield. I resolved the issue by turning the wipers up, then down, then up again, resulting in various degrees of visibility and not a few swearwords. Crash course indeed.

Despite Central Hudson’s informative emails, I have not yet figured out the difference between an Ice Storm Warning and a Winter Weather Advisory. I’m too busy looking up snow terms. The Inuits are famously rumored to have a hundred words for snow, and English, I have always assumed, just a paltry few. This proves untrue. The Inuits only have about fifty terms, and English about forty. At least, that is what the Farmers Almanac claims. About ten of their snow terms are really lame, like snowfall and snowdrift. But did you know that penitents are tall thin spikes of hardened snow? A barchan is a horseshoe shaped drift, and sun cups are shallow bowl hollows formed by patches of intense sunlight. Move over, Inuits!

Meanwhile, Angel Cat just jumped up on my desk and, putting her nose up really close to mine, stared intently into my eyes. Having extracted all the information from my brain, she jumped down and wandered into the bedroom, where she will casually transmit it to her alien friends over the course of the ice storm.