Home Again

We survived it all. Again. Thursday morning started off sticky, literally, with needles going into my brain. Yes, it hurts. A lot. It got kind of interesting when the doctors couldn't find a pulse in my brain for a while. You pretty much need one of those pulses to be, well, alive. I was obviously alive, but they really, really wanted to find that pulse. We all breathed a sigh of relief when they found it, faint, but there. When I mentioned that my husband has always thought I should donate my brain to science when I die, the doctors agreed that it would be a service to mankind. I don't think they were joking.

Thursday afternoon was even more needles. Sigh. But then we packed up and left, on our way home. Yea! Our feeling of euphoria was short lived. We hit Iowa, and Iowa hit back with a nasty snowstorm. What falls silently at home was hitting our windshield so hard it sounded like hard rain. It looked like dense fog. Yes, we know better than to schedule a trip in January. It was getting dark and slick. We pulled off at a hotel, only to learn it was shut down. Lovely. We got back on the interstate, diligently praying for our safety and for a hotel to magically appear.

We made it to Cedar Rapids, and then got totally twisted around in downtown. We could see the hotels, but we couldn't get to them. They have an amazingly twisted version of one way streets. We managed to accidentally get back on the interstate going north, the direction we had just come. Not a good thing. My husband was not using his happy voice. The streets were slick, the traffic was heavy, and we were exhausted.

We got back off, got twisted and untwisted and finally just made a illegal u-turn to avoid going where we didn't want to go again. We found a hotel, found a room, and rejoiced that we were out of that mess. It snowed for hours, and for inches and inches. What the locals called "just a dusting" and what amounted to about half a foot when it was all said and done.

Friday morning we waited for rush hour to clear off the roads, then got back headed South where just a dusting of snow is not half a foot, but half a inch. My kind of snow. My kind of place. Around Here. Thank God.