Yesterday we had a layer of ice on the roads, a thousand or so wrecks even with most people staying home like the Mayor told them to, and cool stuff like this icicle on my balcony roof.  It was a 3-footer.

And here in the Kanas-winter-experienced hands of Marcel LaFlamme, Circulation Assistant extraordinaire, is what you really  need when ice and snow cover a  car.  This tool dislodges ice with 2′ of leverage and brushes off the frosty residue.  Houstonians tend either to not own ice scrapers or to have misplaced them since the last time they were needed.  Parking lots all over town yesterday had people resorting to credit cards to scrape ice off  car windshields –  scritch-scritch-&%#@!!-scritchscritch!! I give myself  a passing grade for being better than totally unprepared.  My ice scraper is AWOL but I have a glove-box stash of hotel and motel key cards for just this reason. Scritchscritchscritchscritchscritch!