… with our most ancient and cherished traditions:
Our Thanksgiving plans got cancelled by Michigan weather, so we’re having lasagna today. I was actually looking forward to seeing a couple of people, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had worse holidays.
Tag: snow
Well, that was fun
Fall’s over, apparently, after a delightful couple of weeks; there’s a winter storm scheduled to roll in tomorrow that in theory could deposit as much as a foot of snow. We got our annual “Here’s how we handle snow delays” email from the boy’s school– and, as he’s an 8th grader, had a moment of reflection as we realized we were never getting another one after eleven years. We’ve been parking both cars in the driveway since March as the garage has gotten filled with bullshit, so the big task today was to de-bullshitify said garage and make it able to harbor motor vehicles again. The snowblower and mower have switched positions for the season.
You may remember that we had a synchronous e-learning day recently so that we could basically rehearse for snow days; I am entertained that one looks at least distinctly possible if not likely (“Hazardous conditions could affect Monday morning commutes” is a danger sign in a winter storm alert) and absolutely no one was warned to bring devices home over the weekend. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
Tomorrow I am hanging the new curtains if it kills me. I will not go another day with the general public being able to see into my living room, God damn it. This may sound like it’s not much of a project, and it genuinely shouldn’t be, but I can’t believe I’ve been staring at these boxes on my dining room table for this long.
What the hell, Indiana
It has been hot and gross for a couple of weeks now, and the humidity has been grotesque enough that I have genuinely had some trouble breathing while outside recently. Yesterday was supposed to be in the low eighties; it didn’t really appear to make any difference and everything was still horrid. Today the high was supposed to be 77 degrees; I took a risk and wore my usual jeans.
I have not lived in Indiana for my entire damn-near-half-century life, but I have lived in the Midwest for all of that time, and I know what the Goddamn sky looks like in November. It looks exactly like that, which is what I was greeted with when I left work this afternoon, and stayed like that the whole way home. Even weirder? Maybe I’ve had the world’s strangest stroke, but I swear to everything you might find holy that I could smell snow.
Was there snow? No, of course not; that would be damn near unprecedented in late August, and it wasn’t remotely cold enough besides. I cannot describe the level of sensory discontinuity(*) this led to. My body was telling me slightly cool for August and my nose and eyes were telling me Mid-November; snow coming.
Stupid state.
(*) This is not exactly the word I want, but my brain is stuck on dysmorphia and dystopia, both of which are even wronger than discontinuity. If I happen to remember the word I want or someone volunteers it, maybe I’ll edit.
I don’t even know what I want any more
I feel like I haven’t done anything at work all week except for talk about whether there was going to be school tomorrow or not. It’s supposed to snow all night and into tomorrow morning, with upper-end predictions being six inches of snow and a tenth of an inch of ice mixed into that, and that’s pretty ugly. The district has changed their mind– and sent out emails about said mind-changing– about what another closure would look like approximately nineteen thousand times this week. On Tuesday I was confidently told by a Downtown Person that we weren’t going to do e-learning at all if we had to cancel, and would just add a day to the end of the school year. By the end of that day we’d received five different emails about our procedure for synchronous e-learning, which are the Covid-style days where we’re in Google Meets all day. By today it was back to “traditional e-learning,” which caused widespread confusion because no one really knows what the word traditional means when it’s used in that sentence. Then they clarified that, without also clarifying that we aren’t allowed four asynchronous days during the school year and this would be the fourth, which was what set off all the speculation about what we were doing in the first place. Maybe we’ll lose the professional development day in March and just have school that day? Nobody fucking knows.
Incidentally, I recognize that this would require quite a roll of the dice, but if I go through the snow totals for each day for today through next Monday, I get the sum of eighteen inches of snow over the long weekend (Presidents’ Day is Monday, remember) which might cause fuckery with school being open on Tuesday.
I’m predicting a two-hour delay. I have moved into the I Have Shit to Do God Damn It point of the year, which means I don’t really want any more delays or closures, except I kind of do, because who wants to go to work if they don’t have to? Nobody. On top of that, it’s a Thursday before a four-day weekend when everyone has spent the entire week openly speculating that there will be no school on Thursday. What this means is that a lot of our kids will conclude that if there is school, it’s unfair, and they won’t show up anyway.
One way or another I am absolutely not making any Goddamn lesson plans for tomorrow until I know what’s going on. There’s no point.
Blech.
Bring it, bitches
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.
What do you think? Should I do it?
POlar VORtex (clap, clap, clapclapclap)
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.
As little as possible
Today’s activities included:
- Far Cry 5;
- Reading King: A Life, the newest biography of Dr. King, which is real interesting so far (I’m 100 pages in, which more or less covers his life up until marrying Coretta.)
- Dassit.
Tomorrow will feature clearing the driveway of snow and Lego, hopefully in that order.
Not so much
We did not get a snow day, although most of the surrounding districts did. That said, it’s polar vortex time, and right now if the forecast doesn’t change I’m not expecting to return to work until Thursday, since we’re currently expecting wind chills of 20 below or colder for Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As children are idiots and show up to school without coats and wrapped in thin blankets (and this is, to be clear, often a choice, unrelated to poverty) we cannot have them outside walking to school or waiting on the bus when the windchill is 20 below. So.
And now, I am dying, and I shall sleep. We absolutely aren’t going anywhere tomorrow on account of the weather, and my plan is to spend the whole day doing as little as possible.
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