Weather Rant

My Mustang will be six years old in March.  It has never seen rain (...well...once for 20 minutes when I got caught out...).  But it doesn't get stored in winter.  I put 10 miles or so per month on it to warm up the fluids and make the tires round again.  It's easy: wait for rain to wash the salt off the roads, and for them to dry out after that.  Mild winter weather like that is customary.

This winter, the car hasn't been out since early November and, based on the weather forecast, it won't make it until mid-February.  Three months and counting.  This has been the worst winter in Chicagoland in the 24 years I've lived here.  It has combined the worst features of Cleveland (lake effect snow and grey skies day after day) and Minneapolis (biting cold for four months).

But similar complaints are coming in from around the Great Lakes.  People I know in Minneapolis feared they wouldn't be tired enough of winter, yet, when they made reservations for Cancun for mid-January.  They were.  Southern Illinois has had biblical rains and unseasonal flooding.  Even the Southeast got hammered earlier this week.  Among my acquaintances, only one is reporting a mild winter.  In, of all places, Kansas (where one expects blizzards expressed in from the Rockies).

This pic was taken after two passes through the drive-thru car wash and a slow 4-mile
drive home on mostly dry roads.  Before that, the car wash was closed for three days
due to subzero weather.  But doubtless the owner's revenue is way up, season over
season.  Meanwhile, the Mustang sits...and sits...and sits...under its cover.