I don’t need a morning frost report, wth is happening on the bridge

I’ve got a bit of a morning ritual thing. Since I’m a bit bleary eyed at 5:30am (literally – I can’t open my eyes without putting in eye drops that simultaneously lubricate them from a night of drying out and make everything blurred for about 10 minutes) I depend on that ritual to ease me into the day.

Eye drops, feet on floor, grab toothbrush from bathroom as I walk by, hit the power button on the laptop, walk outside with the dog so he doesn’t bolt through the open gate when he goes out to do his morning biz.

Back inside, type password into laptop, rinse mouth, start coffee, open Gmail and Google Reader, turn on the morning news to get a traffic report. See that last thing? Traffic report. It’s an important one, because it tells me if I need to get my son up early – if there’s a major accident on the bridge we drive over to get downtown for school, I’ve got to get him out the door 15 minutes earlier so we can detour.

So this morning I’m just settling down with the laptop and the morning news and Channel 13 flashes to the Traffic Reporter. She’s not in their state of the art studio, with her maps and her flashing lights and her traffic news. What is she doing?

Why, she’s in an apartment parking lot on the west side scraping windshields. Wearing boots she seemed very proud of. (Did she really think that we might be getting a surprise snow storm to go with that razor thin layer of frost on the cars? And maybe if she’d stayed back in the studio, where they have a weather man on hand, he could have let her know that thought is more than a bit delusional.)

She evidently was not there after being stranded there by the miniscule layer of frost that – gasps!- formed on her windshield in our subfreezing weather last night. No, she was scraping frost from every car she came across ("I hope I don’t set off anyone’s car alarm!” >insert giggle<), on live tv. I don’t even think she lives there, although she wisely didn’t say either way on the air.

But the point of my rant, and you’re probably regretting reading long enough to get to it, is this – How exactly does this live demonstration of frost scraping help me know if there’s a problem on the Matthew’s Bridge? I think I’m going to have to check out the other local news stations and see if anyone else can do a better job of waking me up in the morning.

My outraged reaction at this slight deviation from my usual morning routine also makes me think it’s entirely possible that I’m turning into my grandfather, but that’s a story for a different post.