Cat picture!

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In case you were wondering…

2014-02-01 12.12.11…the golf course is closed today, I think.

 

How to win at King of the Hill

1538942_10152128972078926_1808992687_n…be able to fly, or jump really high.

Wife’s home until noon, when the travel ban goes away; boy’s home all day.  The agenda, in vague order of priority, and not including “interact with and/or care for family members”:

  • Finish BA 5.  It’ll be up tonight or tomorrow;
  • Success groups for next week;
  • Finish the school improvement plan we were working on during our retreat last week;
  • Write 21 days of brief 7th grade Math lesson plans for the run-up to ISTEP;
  • Respond to a whole bunch of email;
  • Various Washington, DC miscellany;
  • Finally log into my retirement account now that I’ve got that PIN I needed (it came in last week; haven’t used it yet, may have lost the paper it’s on);
  • Listen to a whole bunch of new music I downloaded yesterday;
  • Possibly settle For Once And For All who should have won the Grammy for Best Rap Album;
  • Figure out why I care about the Grammys;
  • Do not go outside again, because holy shit;
  • Get as close as possible to finishing the excellent book about World War II that I’m reading;
  • Figure out what’s next once BA 5 is finished;
  • Get a draft of the letter to the state Superintendent written or at least conceptualized;
  • Play with Scrivener;
  • Clean the house a bit.

I have been thinking all weekend that we’d be back to school tomorrow; current projections show that we’re still going to have a temperature in the high negatives at 6-7:00 AM tomorrow, which means that we’re still pretty doubtful.  So right now we’re trying to plan this out as everything in a day.  We’ll see.

 

 

Winter Wonderland, if wonderlands sucked

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Woke up to the sound of a bathroom door shutting and realized that the wife and son were still in the house after all– there’s ten damn inches of blown snow in the driveway and the county’s under a travel watch again.  So have some pictures of my back yard through a window.

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Vortextual analysis

So, this is the “before” image, only taken from outside with the sun out rather than through my dining room window:

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(Man.  That was literally a hipshot; I had my headphones on, with the cord running through my hoodie, and rather than untangle everything I just pulled my phone out of my pocket, pointed it at the snow at more or less waist height and took the picture.  It came out prettier than a lot of deliberate photos I’ve taken.  Wow.)

After looks like this:

IMG_1054I really hadn’t realized when I went to bed last night how bad the snow was going to be; if I had, I’d have gotten out there and cleared the couple of inches that were already on the driveway, since that older compacted snow made getting rid of the newer stuff twice as annoying.

That said, this is mostly blown snow and not new-fallen snow; note that it was six or seven inches deep against the garage (which you can’t see in either picture) but really thin off to the right over there, and toward where the driveway meets the street there was probably an eight or nine inch swing from the left side of the driveway to the right.  Some of that is going to be because the street got plowed before I got out there, but this measure was taken quite a distance from the road:

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Judging from the weather reports for the next few days, I’d be really surprised if I was back at school before Wednesday of next week, since Monday and Tuesday’s cold are supposed to make yesterday look mild– and it was definitely temperature that closed us yesterday and not snowfall.

Anybody want to help me start campaigning with the state to push the ISTEP test back a couple of weeks?  Extra school days in June really don’t help anybody.  I need the time before the test– at this point I’d almost rather lose Spring Break; at least that would give me some class days before the multiple choice administration of the test.  I just hope I stay healthy for the spring; I’m not going to be able to lose a single minute between now and ISTEP.

Shit.

 

 

THE RETURN OF POLAR VORTEX

1530540_10152122576443926_1301966851_nIn theory, at least, there’s a driveway under there somewhere.

Apparently I have some work to do before I leave the house today.

 

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.)

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