so maybe, next, I'll buy some gloves.

Here's the thing. My hands don't really get that cold. I'm fortunate, I know; but especially down here below the MaDix where winter is normally more of a state of mind than a season, I so rarely need the damn things. If it's cold out, I put my hands in my pockets. The only times I usually wish I had gloves are when I have to open the trunk when the car is caked with muddy slush and road salt. (Closing the trunk is no problem, but you can't use that handle on the inside to open it, worse luck.)

This morning, I budgeted extra time to de-ice the car when I was thinking about how early to leave for work. HA! It is to laugh. Before I could even think about the ice on the car, I had to deal with the ice around the car, which, thanks to the industry of the snowplow they'd sent around the parking lot, was about eighteen inches high behind my back wheels. I managed to dig the wheels themselves free of the ice with my trusty scraper -- so I could rock the car back and forth, but not a chance could I get out over the hillock behind me. So I called AAA, on the off chance that the only way I was going to get out was hooked to a tow truck; but I called them off twenty minutes later (out of the 90 they'd estimated it would take someone to get to me) when a lovely lovely maintenance guy finally managed to break away the ice behind my tires and supplement my reverse gear with a shove on the front bumper. I was free! And then had only to clear off the windshields.

Keep in mind that the last time we had Weather here in Our Nation's Capital, it was a couple of inches of snow followed by freezing rain, so the ice was about a quarter-inch thick with packed snow (but still snow, dudes) underneath it.

Yeah. This? Had always been ice. It was two inches thick, at the thickest point, and hacking at it with the corner of the scraper barely made a dent. Chipping away the thinnest edges and then going at the thicker bits from the sides with the edge of the scraper did better; but the best thing, as it turned out, was this: after the engine had been running for a few minutes, the ice right down at the bottom had naturally started to melt. Cars, these days, are made from plastics rather than metals, so it was ultimately not so difficult to work the beveled edge of the scraper under the edge of the two-inch-thick Sheet Of Ice, give a twist downward to depress the hood a bit, and thus break the seal between the ice and the car. At that point, the ice usually cracked and could be removed in big chunks and tossed out of the way. (This didn't work on the windshield itself, of course, but the windshield was only obscured a few inches up from the wipers, and the great big plates from the hood usually covered part of the windshield as well.)

All together, getting the car out and safe to drive this morning took an hour and a half; and it must have been in tossing away the great big Idaho- and Nevada- and Australia-shaped plates of ice that I cut up my hands on the jagged fucking edges.

huh.

This morning on the radio there was a thing in the traffic report about a truck that had jackknifed or something on the highway. It was still right-side up, the reporter said, but it was at a weird angle off on the shoulder, and people were slowing down to look, blah blah blah -- "and," she said, "a couple of good samaritans have pulled over to make sure the driver is okay."

And I thought, huh -- are they really "good samaritans"?

So okay, of course they're not literally Samaritans. But I'm thinking they're not even really figuratively Samaritans; unless I'm remembering the parable very incorrectly, the whole thing about the Good Samaritan was that a Samaritan would be the last person you'd expect to stop and help you when you needed it, so it wasn't just that he stopped, but that he was a Samaritan and he stopped.

Now, maybe you can argue that commuters during rush hour are among those least likely to stop and offer help to a fellow motorist; but I suspect that when she called those people "good samaritans", the reporter simply meant they were concerned citizens.

Or am I overthinking this? (More so than usual, I mean.)