Trying to Evolve the Ever-Changing Game Plan

I think Mother Nature has it in for me this week. Scratch that – Murphy has it in for me. I love snow. Seriously. Love the stuff. Love being snowed in and unable to leave the house for days, forced to curl up on the sofa with my sweetie and two fuzzy girls. And under any other circumstance, I would be absolutely ecstatic to have another opportunity to be buried under another dump of snow within days of the last one. EXCEPT we were supposed to leave early Wednesday morning to drive down to Savannah, remember? Yeah, not happening. All day, I’ve been watching the weather forecasts carefully, trying to get a better idea of exact timelines, what’s going to hit which areas of which states at what times. We’ve been through at least two or three plans to travel around the storm, but so far nothing seems to be working out. Ideally, I should be there by the time informal check-in starts at noon on Thursday.

We thought about leaving early this morning to get ahead of the storm. Until we looked closer at the weather charts yesterday, made phone calls to the doggie daycare and calculated the timing of how soon we would be able to leave and where we would be able to get and when, then realized that there’s just no way we can outrun the storm. We would have had to have left yesterday and I didn’t even know this storm was heading our way until I got to work that morning. Even then, I tried calling the doggie daycare place several times through the day and they were so short-staffed that the owner wasn’t able to call me back until after they closed at 7 PM. She assured me that they would be able to take the girls whenever we needed to get them there, but I still had prescriptions to pick up, extra dog food to buy (we arrived 5 mins too late; the last customer was just walking out of the store and they had just shut off the lights) and 3 loads of laundry to do.

I thought briefly about trying to sneak out sometime Wednesday in between what was supposed to be two waves of the storm. And then I checked out the hourly forecast and found out that there really aren’t going to be two separate waves. Just one steady stream of snow from hour to hour. Strike two. Which reminds me, I need to make a note to call the hotel and cancel my reservation for Wednesday night.

Right now, we are hoping to be able to leave Thursday morning. We will run out early this morning to pick up the extra dog food and then put in a day of work from home. We’ll pack throughout the day so that we’re ready to leave as soon as possible, and then wait to see what happens. With luck, the storm will finish moving through here Wednesday evening or at least early enough Wednesday night for the road crews to clear out the more often used roadways by early Thursday morning. If we can get the girls to doggie daycare as soon as they open Thursday morning and get on the road, we might have a prayer of getting to Savannah before midnight. Which will give me a couple of hours to sleep before getting up for breakfast and my last chance to check-in and get my materials before the first class starts at 8:30 AM. I’ll have missed Thursday’s reception and festivities, but honestly, I’m just hoping to make it there at all, at this point.

I’ve been planning (and paying) for this trip since July or August, so I’m really trying to be patient and flexible, but it’s not working very well. The situation is less than ideal and, as a perpetual perfectionist, I’m really not happy right now. So I keep planning for worse and worse scenarios and hoping that we won’t get that far.