Let It...Glop

Today, as though to make up my missing out on a perfectly good two hour delay last week, Mother Nature has served up a hefty helping of winter weather which panicked OPM into letting everyone out two hours early.  I chuckled when I found out, because although it was cold outside I couldn't imagine there being any great problems, but looking outside now (only marginally more than two hours after I left work), I begin to see the wisdom of the decision.  There can only be one word for what's going on outside, and that word is glop.  Not falling from the sky, but the result on the ground is distinctly, gloppy.

I walked home from work this afternoon, because I hadn't walked this morning and am trying to lose five pounds of Christmas-weight, and everything seemed fine.  Once I reached the Mall, however, a cold spray of rain began falling, and the wind gradually picked up.  By the time I got home, the spray had become (tentatively) drops, and after I installed myself at my desk, the rain began to take on a distinctly solid sound against the window.  Just before it got dark (it's happening as I write), I took a picture or two of what's going on outside.

As it turns out, it's rather difficult to photograph driving snow, and this probably doesn't look that bad to those of you from the North (like me), but I should point out that this is not fluffy department-store snow.  This is glop.  Look at what's collected on my balcony rail:

It's icky stuff.  It's wet, heavy, and clumpy, and it's probably going to freeze, since we're supposed to go down to the mid-20s tonight (again, not cold for a Northerner, but enough to freeze glop).  I pity the people trying to drive home (as does DCist) - between this weather and the remnants of the flood on Monday it's going to be awful.  Apparently there are a couple of potential names for this sort of weather, all of which prefix "thunder" to the various types of typical winter weather (hail, sleet, and snow), which makes sense only because this all began as rain.  Thundersnow, eh?

So what does this mean?  It means I'm checking OPM's website tomorrow morning before I get in the shower.  Because if this stuff freezes/sticks around we might have another two-hour delay - and this time I'm not going to miss it!