2024, holidays, Seasons, Travel, Uncategorized, Weather

Halfway Weather

27 Comments

I hope that as this post is read, I am on the road to Brookings, SD. We have had days of “halfway weather” lately, a phrase I coined to mean weather that is nasty, but not nasty enough to make you stay home.

Last week there was an ice storm that closed the interstate 20 miles west of here after 27 semis couldn’t make it up the hills. There was freezing drizzle predicted northwest and north central here yesterday, and by Sunday afternoon there was no travel advised on the the roads to the north of us. The two counties just east of us that we need to drive through today were also expecting a “wintery mix” last night. We may slip and slide to Bismarck, but after that we should be ok all the way to Brookings. Driving on icy roads are my worst nightmare. Being the anxious person that I am, I also have been obsessively looking at the long range forecasts for next Sunday, when we are slated to drive home. Like my mother, I worry about the weather and many other things that are totally out of my control. I don’t imagine I am going to stop any time soon, though. Old habits die hard.

What bad habits would you like to stop? What bad habit did you stop, and how did you do it ? Ever slid into the ditch?

27 thoughts on “Halfway Weather”

  2. I would like to stop a habit that seems to have come from my mother… initially seeing people through a negative lens. So many of the people whom I’ve met since retiring and changing continents 6 years ago have turned out to be wonderful. That has thrown my habitual way of seeing them, initially, as defective, into stark relief. I’d like to get past that.

    26 years ago, at the age of 47, I began to stop biting my fingernails. It took that cayenne-laced nail polish to get my fingers out of my mouth, then progressed from there. Took about 3 years, but I broke that unsightly mess.

    I slid into a ditch in 1972 while driving my 1946 Plymouth (which I had brought home from Alabama when I got out of the Army), on icy an icy road in Arizona. I can’t remember any such time since, but I’ve mostly resided where roads don’t ice over. Now, I’m in Michigan, so the ditches are there for entering. So far, so good.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Wherever the impulse to initially see people through a negative lens came from, David, recognizing that it is a “habit” of your own is a major step toward curtailing it. I don’t know if it’s possible to eradicate it, but recognizing it, and reflecting on it before you act on it, is a good start. I struggle with this as well. I think a lot of people do, if they are honest.

      Though I’m not a person “of faith,” I follow several people who are intimately connected to different faiths. One of them is Nadia Bolz-Weber. Nadia is a Lutheran pastor, heavily tattooed, and a recovering addict. Despite my initial apprehension about whether she could possibly have something meaningful to say to me, I find her truly inspiring.”God, please help me not be an asshole, is as common a prayer as I pray in my life,” is one of the things she tells about herself.

      Congratulations on quitting biting your nails. I bet that was hard. Nail biting is one of the few bad habits I’ve never had to deal with, probably because of ineptitude. When I’ve occasionally had a a broken or chipped nail and I’ve tried to fix by biting it, I’ve inevitably made a mess of it.

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

  3. I was a smoker between 1976 and 1985. I quit smoking on D-Day 1985. (Remember D-Day? A non-smoker was supposed to adopt a smoker and the smoker was supposed to quit with their support.) My adopter deserted me and adopted a more glittery, fashion model-type smoker. I was abandoned, hadn’t had a cigarette all day, and I saw her smoking! That made me angry, so I swore to myself that my revenge would be to quit. I went home and started crocheting. Every time I had the urge to smoke a cigarette, I would just crochet. It worked. I never smoked again.

    I have a really bad habit of sitting too much. Inactivity is very unhealthy. All the things I love to do the most: reading, knitting or crocheting, playing an instrument, are sedentary. I do like going for walks, but as I get older it takes more and more motivation. I need to get off my @$$!

    Yes, I know I have hit the ditch at least once, but I really don’t remember the specific instance. It couldn’t have been any big deal or I’d have a clear memory of it.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  4. We are not yet on the road, but will be in a couple of hours. Right now there is no travel advised between Mandan and 60 miles east of there, but I expect conditions will improve by the time we get there. That will be about noon. The roads look really good from Jamestown to Fargo to Brookings.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  5. Rise and Slide Off the Road,, Baboons,

    The on-going habit that I would love to break (and I have intermittently done so) is eating for comfort. Because food is vital to living, I can make every excuse in the world to eat when I could make a different choice. Or I choose to eat too much. This was complicated for years by being a very skinny person who could eat anything and not gain weight. That ended with the hormonal changes that are part of breast cancer treatment. The old habits just did not work anymore.

    The most memorable ditch experience I had was during a snowstorm in 1969 on Highway 75 near Renee’s stomping grounds of Luverne. Our family was returning to LeMars from a wedding in Pipestone so I could attend the Snowball Dance with my then boyfriend. It is a helpless feeling to slowly slide into the ditch. I think it was me who walked to the next farm and knocked on the farmer’s door asking for help. The snow was very deep in that storm.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  6. I too managed to stop biting my fingernails, somehow, the summer that I did summer quarter at Iowa State. Still now sure how that happened – maybe that seeing them look good was enough positive reinforcement. I still pick at my cuticles if they have any rough edges, use a lot of lotion in the winter.

    I slid off the road over winter break my senior year of college, while headed out of town to a New Years party in Des Moines where I was going to stay over at a friend’s. I had just gotten onto the highway and didn’t realize how icy it was. My dad ended up pulling me out (not a deep ditch) with their other car, and then HE LET ME CONTINUE on my way! I don’t remember how I managed to get hold of him for help, as this was way before cell phones (1969-70).

    A habit I’d like to stop now is waking up with a worry conversation. One thought is trying to shift that by thinking of something that went well yesterday…

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  7. I’ve got too many bad habits and if I quit them all, I wouldn’t have anything left.

    I’ve been in the ditch multiiple times. Often right on our driveway. Hills and curves and ice, so, it happens. Sometimes with the car, a few times with a tractor.
    Once, while doing my ‘field reporter’ job, I stopped to back up and look at something (and it wasn’t even work related, it was a to look at a bird or something), and I backed directly into a ditch. I had to go ask the farmer to pull me out. I hope I hadn’t just written a bad report about him or anything, I don’t remember the details anymore. And I’ve been the one to pull people out, too. Sometimes because they’re idiots and they’re out in my field ‘four-wheeling’.
    Who was it that always said “Stay between the ditches”? Jim Ed or Russ Ringsak?

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  8. Like Renee, I’m a worrier, currently trying to recover from a sleepless night spent worrying about family members driving over the holidays. My worrying is compulsive; there’s always something to worry about. Practicing yoga used to help a lot of my mental stress issues, but my yoga teacher retired and I’ve fallen out of the habit. Deep breathing sometimes helps, too. I don’t think I’ll ever completely stop worrying, though.

    I’m also a recovered nail biter and used to pick at my hangnails and cuticles until my fingers were a mess. I’ve lapsed a little this week because of holiday stress.

    I have never ended up in a ditch but have had a couple of scary experiences with icy roads, once when I spun in the middle of an intersection and ended up facing the opposite direction from where I was heading. The other was very early in our marriage. I had to take Husband to the airport for a business trip. There was freezing rain and the highways were skating rinks. I had a white-knuckled drive home from the airport to our home in the northern suburbs, with other vehicles spinning out everywhere. By the next day, there had been hundreds of spinouts in the Twin Cities.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  12. When I was a junior in high school I took a church work trip to Biloxi Mississippi. There were probably 30 of us and we slept on the floor in a very rickety community center. All along the property around the center was some kind of drainage ditch. There were small walkways from the road over the ditch to get to the community center doors. Halfway through the trip a tornado came close and we were advised to get out of the community center and to lay down in the ditch if the tornado came over. The day before, if you had asked me if I would ever willingly get in that ditch, I would have bet large sums of money I would not. And I would’ve lost all those large sums of money.

    Liked by 6 people

    Reply

      1. Not too close that we were truly in danger … but it did put things in perspective a bit for us. We were all appalled that we weren’t in a safe enough place that we needed to be in a ditch and then looked around the community and realized that these folks lived with this all the time. It was quite sobering.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  13. I started smoking in high school in the early 70s. I quit for very short periods of time over the years but always went back to it. In 1993 and 1994 I had cut way back but was still smoking a few cigarettes a week. I had my last cigarette on a Wednesday night in July 1995 – the next day got on a plane for China. Not one cigarette since then and not any desire either. One of the many good outcomes of becoming a parent for me.

    Liked by 6 people

    Reply

    1. I almost forgot about smoking, which I did throughout college and halfway through first year of teaching. Roommate and I wanted, and succeeded, in quitting. For one thing, I couldn’t reconcile the image of me sneaking smokes at lunch hour with then facing the kindergarteners. My last cigarette was sometime in February of 1971, when then boyfriend was in town, and I knew I wouldn’t get through a weekend with him without some smokes. But as soon as he left, I was done.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

Leave a comment