Watching "The Ice Storm" on IFC. Anyone ever been in a REALLY bad ice

storm?

I mean like trees snapping, electric wires snapping, the whole area shut down?

I think I have, only once, in the late 70s.

(Also, I really like this film, it's good.)

someone other than your SO or spouse.

How weird.

I mean yeah the married couples in our group do a bit of harmless flirting in FRONT of everyone (no one cares, we're all friends and no one means it, anyway), but going HOME with someone else?

Huh-uh. No way.

during the time of the sexual experimentation after The Pill was introduced and "The Joy Of Sex" was published, people were trying all sorts of things.

Put in context, the swapping parties made sense.

It's all sort of ancient history, but, hell, so am I.

to understand more clearly how otherwise pretty conventional middle-class couples would engage in partner swapping.

last ten minutes stunned me. i was in tears. i was totally unprepared for what happened, and i think kevin kline's look over his shoulder at hison at the end was worth ten thousand words

But I remember scraping more than an inch off my car one Easter and sliding freely down streets more times than I care to remember.

All the trees were full of leaves and they dropped like flies.

The weight was so great the one in back of my house just pulled right out of the ground,roots and all. It was a VERY large tree but,luckily, it fell away from the house.

The ice storms there were amazing. Driving down Main Street, the trees were so coated, they'd bend towards each other over the road, making a vaguely threatening arch.

That was where I learned the great joy of driving on black ice. I think it might be more fun than doing a root canal on myself, but I'm not sure.

"The Ice Storm" is a GREAT movie, and a terrific novel.

but it was just as bad in KCK.

No difference in the weather between KCMO and KCK - none at all.

You know, I miss those ice storms. They really were beautiful.

I got a day off of work, most of my co-workers took two. Lots of people lost power, but none of my trees were damaged unlike the "straight-line winds" of last summer, which had me working most of the day on a holiday with no power, and hauling limbs for most of the next week. There was debris all over town, a tree fell on a car right across the street from me, and on a house on the block behind me.

When the branches are breaking in a bad one, it sounds like gunfire.
And snow you can drive on. Ice-not so good.

Winter, 2000.

After three days, when I was finally able to get to the street where I lived, I finally understood the expression, "Looks like a bomb went off" or some variation thereof.

Imagine a street lined with elm trees, each lot containing at least one, most of them two, the trees themselves being no less than 20-30 years old, most older than that. The tops of all of them, every last one, are scattered along the street, a few of the trees having actually split and fallen. This was the reason I couldn't get to my house. I had to wait until trucks could be moved in to clear a path.

Several houses had caved in roofs from falling tree limbs or simply the weight of the ice. All of them had damage. Power lines and poles littered people's back yards. The temperature had never risen above 30 by the time I made it to my home, the sun had not shown, and the streets and yards looked as though they were covered with huge shards of broken glass. There was no light, little sign of life. Luckily the temperature had prevented meat from spoiling.

I slept in a liquor store for nearly a week. I managed the store, and it was located along the main street in town, so it got its power back relatively early. The owner also owned the convenience store next door, which provided food. The store provided relief and a few impromptu parties. Money didn't mean much. People just maintained, shared, and waited.

Strangely enough, I think back on this with a certain, odd sense of pleasant nostaligia.

Not at all.

I went to school in southern Maine, and there were times when we were snowed in and had to rely on each other in an almost primal way. Once, when we were living in an oceanfront hotel (right down the Kennebunkport beach from Walker's Point, where Ratface summers) that wasn't winterized, and the cold started, we put on parkas and hats and boots and gloves and huddled together on mattresses thrown on the floor in front of the fireplace and slept together, holding on to keep the warmth.

That was in 1966, and we still talk about it with a sweet longing.

So, yeah, there's something about the stillness, the cold, the sense of isolation, and the even greater sense of community. I understand completely.

In Feb. My youngest's birthday, aamof. He was supposed to have his first birthday party that day but we got up to no utilities, ice 2 inches thick on branches, all that stuff. I had grown up in PA and never saw anything like it.

At sunset, I left Montana, headed for Oklahoma. At about midnight the ice was flying and I found myself going up a steep mountain highway. The old panel truck finally couldn't fight the slick road any more, so I stopped. The problem was that the truck began to slide down and to the right, toward an unprotected embankment. No guard rails. I panicked.

My first instinct was to jump out of the truck, which held all of my worldly belongings (including guitars, amplifiers, recording equipment and clothes) and try to hold it in place.

That didn't work.

There was a chain in the truck. I quickly grabbed it, wadded it up in a ball, and threw it under the left front tire. That stopped the sliding movement of the vehicle and I was grateful that the whole mix was not going to roll down the mountain side into the gorge.

I noticed that there were other cars and semi tractor trailer trucks ahead of me. They were also standing still. I was fucked, for sure, standing out on the road, freezing.

Suddenly, something or other that looked like a UFO, complete with spinning colored lights, came into view way down the road behind me. It made a lot of noise. It got closer. And louder. When I finally realized it was probably going to run me over, I jumped back into the truck.

Turned out it was some helluva kind of machine that traversed the ice and spit out massive quantities of sand and salt. In a stupor, I watched it go by and waited. The vehicles ahead of me started moving. I put the truck in gear and, lo and behold, I also had traction and continued on my way.

Thanks for listening.

B-)

Whew.

I never heard of anything like that.

I remember in northern New Mexico, when storms rolled in - snow and ice - watching drivers backing up on the shoulder on the Interstate, trying to get back to the last exit. I got to be pretty good at it, too. Because, sometimes, you were driving into the storm, and you just don't do that.

Once, in an ice storm, my then-husband and I were driving west across northern New Mexico. We were towing our other car, since we were moving to California. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, he was driving, and the sun set around 4 pm.

We were sailing along the Interstate, doing 70, and he said something about all the jack-knifed trucks we were seeing on the side of the road. I said, "Maybe you should slow down?"

He started to say something when we flew off the road. Just flew. The road had iced and it was black ice. We hit it at 70 mph.

As we headed for the grassy median, and I was thinking we were going to fly right into the eastbound lanes and get creamed, the car we were towing snapped off the towbar and, as our car went into a roll down into the median, the towed car came straight at my side of the car.

I got a faceful of safety glass, and we ended up hanging upside-down in our upside-down car. The dog had been sleeping in the back seat, and, after a few minutes, I heard her rustle, shake her had (her tags rattled), and then she walked out of the car - on the ceiling.

My then-husband was hanging, motionless, upside-down. I was sure he was dead.

Then he said something, and all I could think was, "Fuck. I'm gonna have to divorce him instead of being a widow."

I can't tell you how many truckers stopped to help us. I've loved truckers ever since.

(Sorry for being so wordy.)

Unbelievable.

I can't imagine.

so much of it was a flashback to my early chidhood in the 70s

(didn't you love Joan Allen's maxi dress?) and no remote control.

I loved it when Christina Ricci puts on the Nixon mask and tells Elijah Wood he can mess around with her. His face is priceless, you know he's thinking "With you wearing a NIXON mask???"

LOL

It was terrible. Ice over everything. Power outages, some places for quite a few days. One big mess.

in November 1981.

I was camping out with my parents as an unemployed Ph.D. come back to look for a job, and I was supposed to have lunch with my cousin that day.

However, I woke up to the radio announcer saying, "If you aren't already where you're supposed to be this morning, don't bother."

The whole city was covered with ice, and the streets were like skating rinks. The University of Minnesota and all other schools closed. The buses didn't run. The news that evening showed cars driving sideways.

That's the only time that happened in Minneapolis that I know of. It happened in Portland about every other winter, but people (except for those who lived in the hills) just put on their chains and drove anyway. I even bought special treads for my shoes so that I could walk to the store or wherever I had to be if it iced up overnight.

which is long enough to realize you do not want to live in Houston, but I digress.

There was a little, and I mean little, ice storm of about an inch or two that shut the city down. It was bizarre.

Anyhow, my parents got hammered by it. The conditions were such that it was too warm to snow but got cold enough for the rain to freeze.

My parents were without electricity for a few days. They had about 6 huge trees in their backyard fall from the weight of the ice...and a bunch of power lines and telephone poles also fell. The pictures that they sent me were quite amazing. New York looked like another planet.

Here in Virginia, in March no less. The roof of a retirement home caved in, millions of people were without power... the entire area was pretty much paralyzed for days.

Comes with the territory in SE Michigan.

Mine was the only car on the rode and it must've been between 1 and 3 in the morning. Somehow I had crossed the bridge without incident but I had a long, wide suburban street to travel that was a gradual but relentless incline. I was glad there was no other traffic cuz once I started up that road I figured I couldn't stop. I had progressed several blocks before I noticed that my Cutlass Supreme just wasn't going to go any further. In fact, I was starting to slide backwards and I was picking up speed. I kept pumping the breaks to slow my descent and had gone two blocks before I managed to steer the car off the road and park it in a small restaurant parking lot. I walked the remaing 3-4 miles to my house, and didn't mind the cold or the rain cuz I was so happy not to have wheels beneath me.

power out for days and days and days. millions in damage throughout the state.