Attempting resurrection

Trust me folks - this was in my mind throughout - just that hundreds of other distractions kept me away from this wonderful blog world. And immediately I see its changed. Arnab has moved to his own site - and I find his layout kind of repulsive for no obvious reasons. Some of the people whose blogs I used to read has become somewhat erratic and I found myself reading some other "new" blogs ( not always for their writing though!) occasionally. And I am sure I have lost whatever invisible readership I had!

So looking back I found I wrote my last meaningful post a month or half back - which is not exactly an eternity. However its not that nothing of note has happened since.On the contray I could have written at least one post trashing Valentines day (and the associated hassles of "growing" up), may be one on our young basketball team coming within a jumpshot of being the number one in the country riding on an amazing undefeated run to open the season (but its all forgotten now - all comes down to tomorrow's game against Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the "March Madness") or even about how I am ( finally!) getting bogged down by work.

But let me rather talk about my first experience of driving in the snow. I have been driving around for a quite a while now and one of the advantages of driving in Florida is you get used to rain. But as I figured out almost in the hard way - snow is a different animal altogether. I was up there in Fermilab a couple of weeks back - and was spending the weekend in Chicago. I have been to that city so many times that we decided to try out something new - so we landed up in Chinatown. Which was pretty nice by the way - but as it started snowing kind of heavily (at least for me that is!) - we abandoned any plans of exploring the neighborhood - rather settled for a roasted duck and fried Pomfret inside one of the numerous restaurants dotting the area. The real fun began on our way back - not only it was snowing but also there was a thick layer of snow on the roads. First we got mildly bumped from behind while waiting at a light - with almost no damages to ourselves or the car. Even before the the "snow settled " on that - taking a sharp left turn - I skidded , completely lost control and came inches within ramming into a parked car. Somehow I managed not to panic and steer it to safety without braking. That was close! And that told me the vital difference between rain and snow. While driving in rain - you are aware that its raining - so in a sense you are alert. But even when the snowfall stops - there are those layers of ice on the road - which makes the roads dangerous - and me being a total stranger to those conditions - almost ended up with an out of control car.