Yet another Goddamned snow day today, an asynchronous one at least, but my schedule for the next couple of weeks is tight enough as is and I can’t do new instruction on asynchronous days. So today involved a lot of keeping an eye on my email and Nioh 3. This also means that unless next week’s planned teacher inservice day gets cancelled, I’ll go until at least the second week of March without a five-day week. That’s got to be a record, at least during my career. Covid doesn’t count.
As far as I know, there’s no precipitation predicted for tomorrow at all, so hopefully I’ll get to go to work like a big boy. What did you do today?
I do not think that losing school again tomorrow is likely, but if it does happen, I will lose my shit.
I will then go hunting, and rob many other people of their shit.
Which I will then also lose.
I require some normalcy, and I require it right now.
(Wow. Do not use DuckDuckGo.com to search for “fuck snow” if you have the explicit image filter turned off. Jesus.)
Anyway.
Today was, honestly, a pretty decent day– the kids were a little wild after a surprise week off, but not mean wild, just talky and silly– and there’s a new Iron Man #1 out (I didn’t make it to the comic shop yesterday), and I got three books delivered that I’ve been looking forward to, and there’s a new demo out for Nioh 3. So I’ve got a whole lot of media consumin’ heading my way.
Anyway. Everybody cross your fingers and, against all sense, hope for no snow tonight, so that we can keep the Western Hemisphere.
It’s a little hilarious that it was so easy to find a picture of a guillotine appropriately sized for the World’s Littlest Nazi— I have had less luck finding an image of a Smurf-scale gallows—but I want it clear that simply being sacked and thrown back into his rank-and-file regular local Nazi job does not count as a consequence. I’m not sure I believe the news, to be honest; it implies that someone in the current regime either recognizes that Bovino has fucked up or thinks he’ll do as a patsy, and I don’t really believe any of them capable of that kind of thinking. At least I won’t have to look at him or his stupid little cosplay trench coats for a little while, at least until Fox hires him at a much higher rate of pay as an “analyst.” Or he runs for the Senate, or replaces Rubio as Secretary of State. He’ll find a way to fail up; they always do.
The only thing I will accept as a genuine consequence for any of these motherfuckers is life in jail or public execution. That’s what you’re supposed to do with Nazis, God damn it.
Off again tomorrow, and as cold as it’s supposed to be on Wednesday I have an immense amount of trouble believing that we’re going to be back before Thursday. We are going to get what they’re calling a “ground blizzard” tonight and into tomorrow— my wife made the point that they’ve had to make up a lot of words to properly describe this storm. What is a “ground blizzard”? It’s when you get a shitton of relatively dry, powdery snow that blows around easily and then have a night of 40 mph winds. There’s not actually supposed to be much, if any, new snow tonight, but apparently all that we have is about to be redistributed. I cleared the driveway again this afternoon and measured; we’ve received a pretty consistent 14” of snow over the last several days— the deepest part was 23”. It’s probably closer to fifteen or sixteen inches of actual snowfall since it’s starting to compress under its own weight. You can actually see the striations between the different storms, which is really cool.
Thursday is looking like it’s going to be at least relatively calm, but then Friday’s going to roll around and it’s going to be -12 wind chills again, and it seems like double-digit negative wind chills have been a pretty hard line for cancellations for the last couple of years. We’ll have two days of in person school, max, for the second week in a row.
God, I hope next week calms down a little bit, in a whole lot of ways.
I know I’ve taken basically this exact same picture any number of times, but I thought the snow was especially pretty this morning. Note the ice berm at the foot of the driveway that I get to clear later this afternoon. Whee!
This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.
Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.
Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.
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.
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.
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.
