I managed to make it home alive tonight, against all odds. I've always found that my fear of death is directly proportional to how ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense, not the true literary sense) the circumstances would be, so after such a wonderful and life-affirming Valentine's Day weekend, I was a little on edge.

I should clarify a bit. The theme of V-Day for me this year was "meat".

I should definitely continue to clarify. My relationship with meat is normally pretty strained, as it's hard to cook decent meat for one person. So it's usually a frozen chicken breast quickly boiled without seasonings, or some ground beef in my spaghetti sauce.

Not so this weekend! I arrived in Roanoke to a slow-cooked garlic chicken, the whole chicken, where you get the satisfaction of tearing the drumstick off with your own hands. Then last night, we splurged on a couple of filets from the local steakhouse, which came highly (and quite accurately) recommended.

And while it was probably the best steak I've had in my life, I was a bit concerned as my car fishtailed on the road today that it might have been my last.

Driving in bad weather at night is frightening mostly because you feel like the world just stops outside the range of your headlights, like each car is zooming along in its own little bubble of reality, but if you spun out and got stuck in a snowbank, there'd be nowhere to walk, you'd just fall off the edge. And every sign you see puts you 10 miles closer to home, but your speed is 10 miles slower than before, so you're constantly an hour away, like Achilles chasing the goddamn tortoise.

But I'm home, and I'm safe, and probably a little bit wiser for it, and I don't have to worry about driving tomorrow because an underpaid, overworked civil servant will be taking me to work. Unless they don't clear the roads and the busses aren't running, in which case I might just rely on the fact that I don't have a meeting scheduled with my boss tomorrow and find out just how flexible my job really is.