Tag: polar vortex

Good morning! It’s cold!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography4 Comments

I have posted a ton of winter weather pictures over the lifetime of this website, but I feel like I’ve never even seen frozen spiderwebs before.

POlar VORtex (clap, clap, clapclapclap)

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Taken through the window from the safety of my library, that is about nine inches of snow, with maybe a foot or fifteen inches at the foot of the driveway where the snowplows have created a berm. Since I took this I’ve been outside and cleared enough of the driveway for my wife’s car to get in and out and mine to get in and out with a little bit of creative turning, at which point the battery died on my snowblower (mental note: buy a second battery) and I also hit my allotted fifteen minutes of being allowed outside, because, oh, right, it’s thirty below fucking zero out there. 

The high today is supposed to be around 4:00, so I’ll go back out around then and finish the driveway off and clear out enough room for the mailbox to be reachable on Tuesday. I’d love to know what percent of schools nationwide are going to be out on Tuesday; I figure the chance that we’ll be in person on Tuesday to be nearly zero and 50/50 on Wednesday; it’s supposed to warm up a lot in the afternoon but it’s still supposed to be twenty below in the morning and, as I’ve said many times, it’s just not safe. So this will be either a three- or a two-day work week, since even though technically I have to provide instruction on both of those days it doesn’t really count if I’m not actually at work. 

Meanwhile, I’m off on a common wintertime mental tangent, that being fascination at how our bodies perceive cold. As I said, the windchill is thirty below right now, and the actual air temperature is seven below zero. This becomes extremely dangerous after fifteen to twenty minutes and can genuinely be fatal if you’re not prepared for it.

I was absolutely colder on Frozenween than I was just now. Now, there are some mitigating circumstances; while it’s not nearly as labor-intensive as shoveling, even snowblowing nine inches of snow is work, and I wasn’t just sitting in a chair waiting for children to hand candy to, but I also had my beast coat on for Frozenween and a space heater next to me and I still spent half an hour after getting inside cradling a chemical hand warmer like fucking Gollum with the Ring.

(If you are from somewhere where it doesn’t usually get cold, or if you generally suffer from cold hands, these things are fucking lifesavers. I rarely have need to use them as a born-and-bred Northman but you should make sure you have some on hand just in case. Honestly, I should throw a set in the car, now that I think about it.)

Anyway, the difference, of course, is that my body has done whatever the hell bodies do when they adjust to cold weather; the other fun example of this will be the first day in Spring when it’s 45 degrees outside and everyone acts like it’s the middle of summer and goes outside in shorts and t-shirts. But I will never stop finding this fascinating; it is objectively much colder than it was on Halloween and I know I have to go back out in it again in a couple of hours and it’s genuinely no problem at all. 

Okay I’m ready to go back to work now

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

45 below zero yesterday, forty below zero this morning, and I’ve been to school one day this week and twice in the last nine days. I went outside for a couple of minutes yesterday just to feel what -45 degrees felt like, and it is not something that I would recommend– not because of the cold, oddly, but because of the weird shit that happens to your skin after spending even just a couple of minutes outside in that shit and then coming back into a 68 degree house. That’s a temperature shift of somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten degrees in seconds, and it turns out that it’s a bad idea.

It’s possible that there won’t be school tomorrow either. I don’t know that it’s terribly likely for a number of reasons– objectively, it’s still gonna be fucking cold tomorrow, with a windchill below zero, but the actual air temperature will be positive and I think after the last several days they’re going to look at that and go meh, good enough and have the day. Attendance will be shit because a lot of parents are going to shrug and let their kids stay home anyway but it won’t add another day in June.

(Goes and looks at the forecast)

Jesus H. Christ this shit is NOT NORMAL:

-25 on Wednesday (yesterday,) 53 on Monday, then a low of 6 again on Thursday. This is Goddamned ridiculous.

Anyway, one way or another I’ve been stuck in the house for a bit too long at this point and everything is starting to bore and/or aggravate me and despite the fact that it’s still currently -8 outside I may need to leave the house this afternoon just for the sake of my sanity. I’m maybe an hour or two away from beating Dark Souls again and part of me thinks I should just roll straight into DS2 for the third time after I finish that. The rest of me is starting to think this is borderline unhealthy and hey you have all this free time maybe finish writing a book?

That’s the stir-crazy talking, obviously. Clearly it’s all nonsense. What are y’all doing to stay sane while outdoors is trying to kill us?

It’s still cold as hell outside

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

…just in case anyone was wondering. I walked out to the mailbox in jeans and a zipup hoodie a few hours ago just to see what would happen, and by the time I got to my mailbox my mustache had frozen.

I look forward to the inevitable videos tomorrow of people tossing boiling water into the cold air and watching it freeze. Maybe I’ll even make one. Just remember, folks: always throw your hot water downwind, and make sure that’s not where the cameraperson is standing.

In which I almost die because I’m stupid but then I don’t so it’s okay

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

I have made a number of very bad driveway-related decisions in the last 48-72 hours, guys.

BAD DECISION THE FIRST: I did not get up at five this morning to clear the driveway before going to work. This ensured that a day and night’s worth of wet, heavy snow was on my driveway– the type of snow that doesn’t basically disintegrate back into fluffy snow when the snowblower tosses it, but limply splats back onto your driveway a few feet away, ensuring that you just have to move the same snow over and over again and that the job gets harder and harder the closer you get to being done.

BAD DECISION THE SECOND: I did not clear the driveway of the relatively small amount of snow that had fallen in previous days either– basically I should have hit the driveway at least twice instead of zero times in the last four or five days– which ensured that under the wet, heavy snow is now a layer of hard-packed, days-old, repeatedly driven-on ice, meaning that at least twice I got a split-second holy shit I’m about to break my leg and die out here scare while clearing the driveway. Now, neither time did I fall and break my leg, but another inch or so of sliding either way and something really shitty woulda happened.

BAD DECISION THE THIRD: I had on my beastcoat. Understand that I have two articles of cold-weather outerwear: a “winter coat” and a Winter Coat. I wear my “winter coat” most of the time and I rarely button it. I am Of the North and the cold generally does not bother me very much, but all of the talk of fifty below wind chills over the next couple of days has somewhat thrown me off of my game. My Winter Coat is rated to sixty below zero, and I need you to understand that in the most literal sense possible my Winter Coat possesses no chill whatsoever. It’s a Carhartt, for those of who who will understand that. And I need to be careful when I wear it, because most of the time it’s way too goddamn much coat for what I need. For example, if I’m going to wear it in the car I cannot have the heat on. I’ll be sweaty by the time I get out of the car, even on a short drive. Opening the windows is actually not a bad idea.

Wearing this motherfucker outside, with a sweater on underneath, on what isn’t really that cold of a day (yet) while performing strenuous work– another disadvantage of the ice is that the wheels on the snowblower don’t work at all and I’m basically just ceaselessly shoving it through 6-8″ of, again, heavy wet snow– meant that I realized halfway through the job that I was feeling kind of woozy because of, no shit, impending Goddamn heatstroke.

Yeah. My wife wasn’t home yet and my son was inside by himself doing who knows what, so if I break a leg and then die in the driveway I’mma stay leg-broke and dead in the driveway until she gets home, because it ain’t like he can move me, or that he’d even look up from the iPad long enough to notice my dead ass out there. So I went inside for a few minutes, let my heart rate slow down, took off the sweater and the beastcoat, and swapped my soaked-in-sweat knit winter hat for a regular baseball cap. And then made …

BAD DECISION THE FOURTH, which was going back outside before mopping my stupid, covered-in-sweat body off. Because what with all of the sweating and dying from roasting myself alive inside my fucking Beastcoat I’d forgotten that, while not much by historical standards, it was actually fucking cold outside, and that you really do not want to be outside on even moderately cold days if you are soaking fucking wet. And while I can’t be trusted to say whether the temperature had actually dropped while I was inside– it’s not like I was feeling the actual air temperature anyway– I can sure as hell state with certainty that the wind picked up pretty substantially while I was inside, meaning that any residual body heat I had left was gone, gone gone within minutes of getting back outside, and I still had half the damn driveway to do. Eventually I had to come back inside and put a third hat on, and the first thing I had to do when I finally came back inside for good was mop off my beard, which is super fun.

On the plus side, now that I’ve survived all this stupid bullshit, warmed up and cooled off and dried off, I’m going to go take a shower and then change into sweatpants and a sweater and I am not going outside under any circumstances for the next three days, whether work calls off or not. Chicken soup time, motherfuckers.

In which we’re all gonna die

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

Eagle-eyed and observant readers may have noticed that yesterday’s non-music-related post went up at about 2:30 PM, which is a time when one might expect me to be at work. As it turned out, yesterday was a snow day; we got ourselves a nice little ice storm Tuesday that went through into the morning hours and basically every district nearby called out, so the boy and I were home together all day.

Honestly, I suspect that the cancellation was less due to icy roads than icy school parking lots; the walk to my car after work was genuinely fucking terrifying, and while the roads get salted and plowed all night, the parking lots of the many schools we have in town do not, and it only takes one person slipping and breaking a hip and then the district is out a huge amount of money.

Today, there was school. Tomorrow … well …

Twenty below zero wind chills is gonna mean no school tomorrow. There are legitimate safety issues with kids who walk to school or have to wait outside for buses when it’s that cold. It ain’t happening. I’m sure they’re gonna make us wait until 5 AM and all that like usual when they make the call-off, but … nah. It ain’t happening.

Next week? Yeah, this is next week:

JESUS CHRIST, WEDNESDAY, WHAT THE FUCK DID WE DO TO YOU?

Now, the 20 below thing tomorrow morning is wind chill. The temps on that image are actual air temperatures, meaning that Wednesday is gonna be fifteen below before the seventeen mile an hour winds get taken into consideration. I would not be surprised if we lost the entire back four days, and Wednesday and Thursday are Goddamn guaranteed unless the forecast changes substantially. That’s “the air is trying to kill you” territory right there.

So, yeah. If I suddenly stop posting next week it’s because the entire Midwest is frozen fucking solid. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

Odds and ends/proof of life post

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

polar-vortex-nasa-670-1I woke up the other day and consulted my watch to discover that it was thirteen degrees below zero outside.  I feel like we were largely spared polar vortex horror last year, for the most part, but this year has definitely picked back up on the trend of the last several years, which is that the weather at the end of Winter Break is horrifying enough that school being cancelled and the break being extended is at least plausible if not guaranteed.  The boy goes back on Monday, finally, and I think the weather will be back to winter-normal by then, mostly, but holy fuck has it been cold around here lately.  There’s maybe, I dunno, fifteen inches of snow on top of the house, too, which means that we probably got eighteen to twenty since it tends to compress under its own weight after a while.  On the plus side, the new car appears to handle pretty damn well on ice and snow, or at least the new tires I put on it not too long ago appear to have done their job.

IMG_6692.jpgIN OTHER NEWS: the Lumberjack Beard is dead; long live the Lumberjack Beard.  I don’t normally shed my winter beard this early in the year, winter having just barely started, but apparently the answer to this year’s beard question, i.e. “How long can I let this fucker get before it starts to drive me insane?” is about nine weeks.  Granted, I brushed it backward to make it easier to shave off for that picture, but this was easily the bushiest I’d ever let my beard get, and unexpected side effects were starting to crop up– like eating getting much messier and– and this one really surprised me– all that hair on my face actually making it harder to sleep.  I think if I groomed it a bit better it wouldn’t have been as much of a thing, but I’m a novice at this and wasn’t super interested in putting in the research time.  I’d intended to just dial it back but ended up going completely back to the vandyke that I keep on my face for the other eight months of the year.  I may grow it back right away or I may not, but I won’t be doing Full Lumberjack again anytime soon.

IMG_6678.JPGMy phone is starting to slowly fill up with pictures like this, and I’m starting to see grid shapes with arcane symbols and glowing lines on them every time I close my eyes.  My buddy James Wylder posted a shot to Instagram of a bunch of notes and diagrams he was working with as he was playing through The Witness, and upon discovering that the PlayStation store had it for $15 and deciding I could use a more cerebral break from Horizon: Zero Dawn and Nioh, I was in.  Two days later I’m hooked as fuck.  I’d compare the game to Myst, but Myst had a genuine story to it and this really doesn’t; the reward for solving puzzles is more puzzles and occasional frustration and headaches.  There have been a couple of puzzles where I’ve had to cheat to get through them and at least one where even when the answer is on the screen in front of me I’ve been unable to figure out why the right answer was the right answer, but for the most part it’s hitting a nice sweet spot for me– challenging enough that solving the puzzles isn’t automatic, but not so challenging that my rapidly-becoming-legendary lack of patience with video game bullshit kicks in.  If noticing that some vines near you are a different color from the other vines and then figuring out how to get outside and line your screen up perfectly so that the vines trace the right path on the grid in front of you, and then taking a picture of it with your phone because fuck that, you don’t seriously expect me to memorize this, do you? sounds up your alley, check it out.

I had plans to write fiction this week, but they were burned to the ground once I realized that I’d have the boy with me all day yesterday and today for the last two non-weekend days of his break.  I’ve been lazy as hell on hiatus since Tales came out but it’s time to get back on the horse.  Next Thursday, then, I will either officially begin work on the latest version of the sequel to Skylights or start working on my entry for this anthology or both.  Because battle poets.  

Book sales have had a nice little spike lately too.  After most of a year where if I was selling a book or two a month I was pretty happy with it, I’ve sold five books today, two yesterday, and twelve since Christmas Eve– and that absent any sales or any particular promotion on my part other than a few surprisingly well-received Tweets.   In an absolute sense that doesn’t seem like much to brag about but I’m still in holy shit people are sending me money for stories mode, and I kinda hope I never break out of that.

That said, if anybody else wants to keep the ride going, that would be awesome.  Reviews would be cool, too, especially of the three that aren’t even at 10 yet.  Wanna help me out?