We ended up with a two-hour delay this morning, which didn’t get me any extra sleep but did mean I could sit in my comfy chair and drink a leisurely cup of coffee before leaving for work, and then buy a second cup of coffee on the way to work. It took about twice as long to get there as usual, but the drive itself wasn’t scary, just slow.
Then somehow it spent all day snowing like hell but without any significant accumulation at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how that happened. It snowed hard today, and the two inches or so that was on my driveway when I got home was the deepest snow I saw all day. I feel like at least four or five inches of snow fell. I’m just not sure what the hell happened to it once it hit the ground.
There’s a slight chance of a second delay tomorrow– the storm is supposed to end late tonight, but it’s still going to be cold as hell in the morning– but I think I’d prefer to just have a regular day. Either way, we’re about to hit the two-weeks-until-winter-break point, and so far, so good.
The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.
So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.
The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.
Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.
There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.
It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.
For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.
My Algebra kids have a final on Tuesday, God, and as much as I’d like to see a massive blizzard start at 5:00 in the morning and cancel school this week, if you could put it off until Wednesday morning and then maybe have it last a couple of days I would appreciate it. Thanks.
The new snowblower proved its worth; that’s six or seven inches of pretty heavy snow and I took care of it in maybe fifteen minutes of work. That said, that fifteen minutes pretty much wiped out the battery, so I think investing in a second for backup is probably a good idea. I’ll go out at least once more today before it gets dark and do it again and probably broaden the cleared area by a couple more feet; we had a plow come through and hit the cul-de-sac once so there will probably be another berm to remove by the end of the day too.
School has already been cancelled for tomorrow and I fully expect to lose Friday as well, since it’s going to keep snowing through late Thursday and there won’t be time to sufficiently clear side roads and parking lots of this volume of snow before Friday morning, plus the temperature is expected to plummet again. I could use a five-day weekend to start February off, frankly.
2nd snow day in a row, this one for basically every school in northern Indiana but one at the moment, and no one in my family attends that one stalwart school.
This is the lilac bush next to my back door, taken from inside the house, because the bush is now blocking the door:
More later; I’m going to give the neighborhood half an hour to wake up and then go clear the driveway again, because there’s a berm at the foot of the driveway and my wife still has to go to work.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my life gone from “didn’t know I was sick” to “calling in to work” faster than I did Thursday morning. I literally woke up, turned my head, and reached for my phone to pull up the SubFinder app. I don’t know who broke into my skull during the night and replaced my brain with a billion shards of broken glass, but as soon as I turned said head all those shards of glass went straight into my eyes and my forehead. The decision was instantaneous.
I think I stayed awake long enough to text my wife, who wasn’t in the room, that I wasn’t going to work and not to wake me back up, and that was it: I was out, completely, until after 1:00 PM, and spent most of the rest of the day bouncing back and forth between “napping” and “wishing I was dead.” I got up for a few minutes when Bek came home for lunch, ate something, and promptly lost it about 15 minutes later. Yesterday was marginally better, enough so that by the time evening rolled around I went out for my wife’s birthday dinner with my family but not better enough that I went to work. Today I’d call myself 85% human. I’ll take it.
Outside, we’re having another blizzard. It’s not going to accumulate much, I don’t think, but it’s blowy as hell and there have been several times already today where I’ve looked out my front door and been unable to see the foot of my driveway. A neighboring county has basically ordered everyone but emergency vehicles off the road, although ours isn’t that bad yet. So cabin fever gets to be something that I can look forward to for the rest of the weekend.
Let’s see. What else is going on?
I am trying very hard not to rant about the upcoming ISTEP test. Very very hard. Two main reasons: one, it’s mostly inside baseball to anyone who doesn’t live in Indiana, and two, it’s too bound up in what is rapidly becoming life-crisis levels of disaffection with my career. Once I get started, I’m not going to be able to stop, and I’m just not willing to go there yet.
I still owe those of you who may be interested a post on Amazon ads. I don’t know that I had officially stopped the advertising campaign the last time I’d mentioned it, but I have by now, and describing the program as “completely useless” is the literal, non-hyperbolic, using-literal-to-mean-literal-and-not-figurative truth.
I am in possession of the final cover, text and all, for THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 2: THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE. I am hugely excited about it and I am doing my best to sit on it for a while longer because the book doesn’t launch until April 28th and I’m trying to save some surprises for closer to release date. My alphas are supposed to be getting back to me in about two weeks; I’ve heard good rumblings from a few of them but nothing official yet.
The Internet has, in general, been destroying my will to live lately. I’m working on that, though. Partially by about tripling my daily dose of Vitamin D. Hopefully you can’t actually overdose on that shit.
I did my taxes, or at least mostly did my taxes. Bad news: I owe thousands of dollars. Good news: I knew I was going to owe thousands of dollars (getting a $10K grant will do that) and I actually owe less than the number of thousands of dollars that I’d set aside to pay for taxes, so at the moment it’s sorta like getting a refund, and that’s before I really start looking carefully at deductions. So, yay for financial planning, I guess?
Not much accumulation yet, but it’s sticking to EVERYTHING. Will probably have to hit the driveway before lunch just because of the weight of the snow. No word on school tomorrow, obviously.
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