If this is a preview of things to come on my trip to New York, I may be in trouble.

I had an unexpected holiday Tuesday when everything north of Little Rock was iced in.  But I need to clarify this, because it wasn’t the ice, per se, that clinched my inability to go to work, it was the fact that my travel luck, or lack thereof, manifested itself in a flat tire during the height of our first ice-storm of the season.  

On the day that I forgot my cell phone at home.

Oh, yeah.  All kinds of fun was had while I tried to change my tire Monday night in the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese while keeping myself turned away from the driving ice pellets that were threatening to freeze my glasses to my face (the decision not to wear my contacts that morning just added icing to that cake, pun intended ).  I finally gave up when one frozen lugnut resolutely refused to budge despite my putting my not-inconsiderable weight with both feet on the tire iron.  

Be aware that IF you ever get the urge to put both feet on an ice-covered tire iron in a driving ice storm and jump up and down, that this is a VERY BAD idea, and you will like end up with the said iron embedded in your calf as you are on your downward trajectory.

I really do not need another broken leg.  REALLY.   Do.  Not.

And now that calf really freaking hurts.

Thankfully the poor girl working alone at the Sonic decided that I was NOT a crazy-fast-food-robber-stalker and took pity on me and let me borrow her cell phone as she broke the rules a tiny bit and let me stand in her foyer while I tried one more time to reach my husband.

I am now a dedicated patron of Sonic.  Not-so-much with Chuck E. Cheese.

So my boys “came to rescue Mommy from the bad storm” (sayeth Harry), leaving just enough time for gratuitous warm-clothing shopping at the conveniently place Gander Mountain (can we say “impulse buy,” anyone?).   Of course, this still left us with the necessity of driving twenty miles through glaze ice on a temporary spare home, then twenty miles back through the same ice to have the tire replaced the next day, on the same temporary spare.  My husband drove, thank God, although I couldn’t have had white knuckles, since my hands were already a beautiful uniform shade of pale blue.

Did I mention that I get Raynauds Phenomenon in the cold?

And thus, I remember, why I left New York.