Tag: blizzard

You’ve gotta be kidding me

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Starting to think that there might not be school tomorrow.  Follow the bouncing ball:

  • Five to nine inches of snow;
  • Starting after 2:00 in the morning;
  • after a period of rain (more ice)
  • and sleet (more ice)
  • coupled with 35-mph winds
  • peaking at two inches of snow an hour at… 6:00 in the morning.

That’s what you call a perfect storm, kids.  It’s basically exactly what you need in this part of the world for snow to cancel school, combined with the guarantee that weather like that will keep a lot of kids home even if the schools don’t cancel, because it’ll be vile as hell outside.  Yes, it’s ISTEP week.  Better or worse: extend testing another day for everyone, or have 15-20% of all the kids in every school need make-up tests?

(For the record: same thing happened three or four years ago.  They cancelled.)

In which let’s be hopeful

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

By the time you read this, one of two things will be happening.  I will either be at work, teaching some middle school students some math, and while I may not be super happy with the readiness of said middle school students for the math I am trying to teach them, I will at least be out of the house and relatively happy with my lot in life:

happyteacher

Or a gateway to Hell will have erupted, consuming most of northern Indiana and southern Michigan, and you will know that something– perhaps another freak snowstorm, perhaps my back, perhaps a power outage at my building, perhaps a bomb threat, hell if I know– prevented me from going to work today and I decided I was done with existence:

800px-the_door_to_hellFun game, right?

In which math makes me angry

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy6 Comments

Y’know, I don’t expect perfection from weather forecasts– either forecasts by actual trained meteorologists or through a weather app.  I want a vague idea of what the temperature is going to be like and a radar; I can figure out the rest on my own.  I’ve discovered a new request over the last couple of days as the weather’s approached record-shitty levels:  I would like the projections being made to make some kind of fucking sense. To not be, oh, impossible.

To wit:

2014-01-06 10.49.48

This particular screenshot is taken from the weather channel’s app; I probably ought to have taken it from Yahoo’s, as Yahoo’s app is terrible, but it’ll do.  Take a look at the forecast for today, Monday, and tomorrow.

Unless they are using definitions of what I consider simple words– “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “high,” and “low”– that I do not recognize, there is no goddamn way that these can be right, because temperature does not teleport.  If today’s temperature is not going to go above -8, it is impossible for tomorrow’s low to be 3, because at some point the temperature has to be in between those two temperatures.

Note that Wednesday’s low is Tuesday’s high, which would be expected and consistent given a gradual warming trend over those two days.  That one makes sense!

It gets worse: when I look at the hourly forecast, I find out that at 7:00 AM tomorrow, they’re expecting the temperature to be -11 and the wind chill to be in the neighborhood of -36.  This is from the same weather service that says the low is going to be three degrees. Their hourly forecast doesn’t project a positive temperature until 2 PM tomorrow, and even then expects the wind chill to be -17.

Again: it contradicts the high and low data that their own weather service is providing.  You can fit both of these inconsistent forecasts on the same screen.

Ordinarily, I’d blow this off– but it really doesn’t seem like it ought to be a terribly difficult programming challenge to get these numbers to pull from the same database, and there is a very real concern about whether my students are going to be expected to walk to fucking school, or wait for a bus, at 7:00 in the morning tomorrow.  There is a big damn difference between three degrees and 36 below fucking zero.

I fully expect school to be cancelled again tomorrow.  They haven’t done it yet, but we didn’t get the call until around 1:00 yesterday afternoon, so they’ve got a couple of hours.  But they’re going to be getting very different data depending on which forecasts they’re paying attention to (and, again, this isn’t just one app— I’m seeing nonsense like this all over the place about tomorrow’s forecasts) and I would hope they’ve got somebody who understands how goddamn numbers work doing the deciding.

I don’t expect perfect forecasts, and I have some understanding of how these things work.  I’m not the type of guy who sees a 20% chance of rain and then gets pissed off when he gets wet.  But a little bit of internal fucking consistency would be nice.

Snowpocalypse 2014: The Postening

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I’ve promised, I dunno, twice now maybe that at some point today there would be a real post and that I wouldn’t talk about the weather during said real post.  That was a terrible lie; there will be a real post (there is now!  It’s this one!) but fuckit I’m gonna talk about the weather some more.    I just went out and cleared the driveway for the second time today; there was the same amount of snow four hours or so after the first clear that there had been the first time, only this time it was colder and showing harder and windier.

Tomorrow is going to suck, children.  The snow has only gotten heavier and faster and thicker as the day’s gone on, and I see no way that I’m not going to have to clear the driveway at least once more before it gets too dark to do it again.  Tomorrow, I’ll have to do it at least once more, only in Death Cold.

Or, more likely, I’ll let the wife take my car to work since it’s an SUV and can get out of the driveway, and I’ll not do it at all, because only an idiot would be outside doing work that could cause sweating in fifty degree below zero wind chills.  Don’t get me wrong; I am an idiot, but I’m not that kind of idiot.

In other news, there’s been a big pot of ragu alla bolognese simmerin’ on my stovetop for the last couple of hours and for the second day in a row I’m gonna eat like a king tonight.  School is cancelled for tomorrow (I’ll probably have the boy; we’re actually expecting daycare to be open, but it seems stupid to send him in, especially since he still doesnt seem to be feeling very well) and I’ve finally managed to get my comic books sorted and separated.  I’m keeping about a quarter of my collection, I have two other boxes mostly ready to send off to friends who requested some books for their kids, and I have an email out to a fellow who said he was interested when I talked about selling my books back in September, so let’s cross our fingers that he’s still interested.  Otherwise… anybody wanna buy about 4000 comic books?  

The plan for tonight is to try and restrain the urge to post further pictures of snowy things, to survive the third driveway-clearing, and to get a bunch more writing done.  I feel like it might actually happen, too; I’ve done a really good job of staying productive all day and hopefully I won’t fall apart once I’ve had dinner.  Don’t put it past me, though.  

Stay warm, kids.  

Snowpocalypse 2014: Still doing this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Same spot, 1:30 PM.  My favorite detail, I think, is the way the snow caps on the neighbor’s bushes have broken so cleanly under their own weight.  The driveway was cleared at 11:30 or so, so what you see is what’s fallen in two hours.  And it’s only getting worse as the day’s going on.

On the plus side, it’s not very cold yet.  And school’s been cancelled for tomorrow, too, surprising exactly no one.

(And, now that I’m looking at both of them in thumbnail, it really doesn’t look much different.  Blowing them both up and comparing them is neat, though.)

(I swear, there really will be a non-weather post at some point.  But this is kinda fun.)

2014-01-05 13.36.00

Snowpocalypse 2014: why not, one more

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

There will be a post with words in it at some point today, I promise.  It may even be about something other than the weather!

Click for a waaay bigger version.

2014-01-05 10.04.03

Snowpocalypse 2014: the prettifying

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Still not a lot of it yet, but man does it look nice:

1488308_10152079418108926_1221120734_n 1497743_10152079424878926_126257428_n

In which we’re all gonna die

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Teaching15 Comments

537194_522538491102596_1957075624_nStorm’s coming; not sure if you’ve heard about it or not.  In my neck of the woods they’re predicting somewhere between six and twelve inches of snow tonight through to tomorrow morning, depending on where you look, and temperatures– not wind chills– around ten to fifteen degrees below zero for Monday.  Along with 20-30 mile an hour winds, which will probably mean wind chills around forty to fifty degrees below zero.

The governor of Minnesota has apparently cancelled school in the entire state on Monday.  He did this yesterday.  My local school corporation/state government isn’t quite as on the ball but I figure there is exactly zero chance that there’s going to be school on Monday (and if there is, I’m betting we’ll have around 30% of our students) and a pretty damn good chance that there won’t be school on Tuesday either.  There’s always a delicate balancing act in situations like this; on the one hand, fucking cold; on the other hand, many of our kids are flat-out going to be safer and, more importantly, better fed at school than they will be at home.  I know for damn sure some of my students get their only hot meals of the day at school.  Then again, a lot of those kids who aren’t getting fed properly at home don’t have coats, either.

Now, in this specific case, it’s pretty clear-cut– if there are really ambient temperatures of fifty below zero outside, the buses aren’t even going to start– but if you’ve ever wondered why the big districts don’t close at the same rates that smaller/more rural ones do, that’s probably a big part of it; student safety cuts both ways.  Either way, I don’t really mind; I’ve had enough of being off of work and am looking forward to getting back– which will probably last through all of an hour or so of actual school.

The wife made a trip to the grocery this morning, returning with piles and piles of food; the two of us sat down and put together three or four days of meals and went out and got everything we needed.  I’mma eat real good for the next few dinners, y’all:

As usual, recipes are heavy on Thug Kitchen and Albert Burneko, and both of these sumbitches need to give me a cookbook I can buy now.

Also?  My wife bought me a mortar and pestle.  Which means I can grind up those dried ghost chilies I bought a while ago and make death chili.  Which I won’t even be able to eat, and neither will anyone else, but omg excited.  I need to find some uses for it other than grinding up those peppers, I think, but surely there’s something out there.

Wait!  I have one:  I can also commit felonious assault, because holy shit is this thing bigger than I thought it was going to be:

1511328_10152077570593926_11820727_nStay warm the next couple days, y’all.