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.
Tag: blizzard
You’ve gotta be kidding me
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
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:
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:
Fun game, right?
In which math makes me angry
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:
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
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
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.)
Snowpocalypse 2014: why not, one more
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.
Snowpocalypse 2014: the prettifying
Still not a lot of it yet, but man does it look nice:
