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No, I can't control the weather but I can sometimes control when I'm out in it.

After church, Dad treated me to Five Guys for lunch. I was thinking about making chili today and I was wondering if I had any beans (I knew I had the rest of the ingredients)...the Five Guys in Mentor is right next to Meijer, and I debated asking Dad if we could stop in and get beans but I figured he'd already graciously drove us over to lunch and paid for it, so I figured I'd go home, get changed and go to Giant Eagle for beans.

While we were at lunch, it was snowing but SUPER lightly and lazily and the roads were fine. When I started off for Giant Eagle, the weather was essentially the same so instead of going to the GE in my town (nicknamed "The Giant Disappointment" by Dad and me because it's a small store and frequently doesn't have what we went for), I went to the GE in Chardon. I was in the Chardon GE for about 45 minutes...I came out to 3" of snow on the car. I knew we were going to have 2-4" of snow yesterday but I wasn't expecting it to fall all within a single hour :-( Now Chardon is a VERY hilly town (the local school's sports teams are actually The Hilltoppers) and once again, I pulled out of a parking lot and immediately had to try to make it up a hill. And once again, my car said "nuh-uh". I had the pedal to the floor and was creeping up the hill at maybe 4-5 MPH; at one point, a vehicle with all wheel drive passed me. I was sweating and praying and grasping the steering wheel in a death grip. My car FINALLY found purchase and the rest of the normally 12 minute drive home was...not great, but except for sliding somewhat down one of the big hills, I was mostly in control of the vehicle.

I am so sick of this winter and SO ready for it to be over. I bought my car at the end of March 2023, so I didn't really do any winter driving then, and the winter of '23-'24 was super mild, plus I wasn't working, so I never had to go out when the weather was really bad, which was only once or twice, and only for a day or even less. This is the third time I've white-knuckled a drive and it's only late January.

And then I got home yesterday and listened to Dad's "This is not a criticism (but really it is)" speech about why couldn't I just have gone to the Giant Disappointment...or just changed the menu plan for today altogether. Why indeed.

In comparison, I'm absolutely fine with the single degree temps today and tomorrow, as we're not supposed to have any more (significant) snow.