I am a worrier, and right now I am very worried about the weather affecting our travel plans. We are supposed to get hit with a bad storm and it’s going to be tough getting to the airport and who knows if our flight will even be going. The words “might not leave until Thursday night” escaped my wife’s lips and I could just cry.

I know the weather is out of my hands, but I worry about it anyway. I can’t just sit back and say “well, we’ll see what happens” - I fret about it. My wife asked her boss if the company would pay to move our flight to tomorrow instead of Wednesday, so we could get out before the weather gets really bad, but he is apparently of the opinion that “it’s just going to rain” so the answer was no. We were thinking of staying at the hotel near the airport so we’d have an easier time getting there, but the boss won’t authorize it and we can’t afford to do it ourselves.

I don’t travel enough to know what happens when there’s bad weather - how bad it has to be before the airports close. I also don’t know if the cab company will send a vehicle that can handle poor road conditions, and we don’t know anybody with a four-wheel drive vehicle, so I am just sitting and worrying with nothing I can do.

It’s 9°F today, with a wind chill of -1° - it was colder yesterday. My winter coat picked this past Saturday to break completely, of course. It is a really ugly coat, I don’t even remember where I got it, I know it was secondhand. But it was warm and soft and served its purpose even though it was ugly. That is, until recently. A month or so ago, the zipper started opening from the bottom whenever I sat down. Not great, but I could deal with it. Then this past Friday, one of the pockets ripped halfway off. Annoying, but I could still deal with it. Until Saturday, when the tab of the zipper broke off, and I was left with only the slider and not the part you pull it up and down with.

So it was definitely time to get a new winter coat. I was going to go to the mall last night but I ended up purchasing one online instead. I remembered from reading catalogs as a kid that Lands’ End had good parkas, and I ended up buying their Stadium Squall Parka in black. I had it shipped via Express UPS for an additional $8, because I’m still wearing the old one and I want the new one now. I don’t have any other coats that are longer than waist-length, and with the current temperatures I need a long coat, so I am just putting up with it until my new one comes.

It’s snowing now, the first snow we’ve had this winter. It’s sticking, but it’s not snowing particularly fast so we probably won’t have more than an inch or two of accumulation. At least that’s what they said on the radio, but they could be wrong! Unfortunately I neglected to bring my snow boots (even though my wife reminded me to) but luckily I only have a short walk to my car - literally just a few steps. I’m not sure how I’ll get the snow off my car, though, because all I have with me is an ice scraper! People around the office are talking about leaving early and so forth, which seems silly to me; I don’t think we’ll actually be released early from work. I do hope we’ll be snowed in by tonight though, because tomorrow is Inauguration Day and local federal offices are closed which means I’d have to spend all day at my agency’s office, which is way too small for all the people that will be crammed in there.