Well, the shortest answer is that it’s something that everyone would be better off without.

It made our backyard look like this:

And the thing to notice is that the twig at the left of the picture is coated about 1/2″ thick all around with ice. That’s the part of it that’s hard to catch on a camera. All the twigs are 1/2″ thick with ice. And so are the branches, the phone wires, the gutters, …

Heck, so is my cute little lawn ornament with the dancing frogs. They look like the White Witch cast a spell on them.

And while there’s something a little fascinating about how things look, the ice storms are nasty, nasty things to drive in. The sleety, gloppy ice is too hard for the windshield wipers and wiper fluid to keep up with, and so you have a smaller and smaller window to look out of as you go on. And when you just plain can’t see, you get out and de-ice the car as much as you can, then get back in and drive as fast as you can before it ices up again. But driving as fast as you can still isn’t all that fast, because the road is also coated with ice and the brakes have a very hard time getting any traction. So any kind of incline is a bit of a trial.

Just staying put and turning up the heat until it’s safe to go out is the best ploy, but that assumes that you have electricity. Because the ice gets on everything and weighs more than snow, an ice storm is much more likely to knock out the power just when you need it the most.

Thank goodness, we look like we’ve made it through this one. The sun finally came out today and the temperatures are above freezing. So now there’s the sound of breaking ice going on everywhere as little pieces and big ones break loose and tumble from every branch and wire.

When we came out to the Midwest, someone told us that the thing to know is that winter usually makes one or two serious attempts to kill you.

Looks like we’ve made it through one of those attempts.