Oh, great, this again

Luther M. Siler

We have a nasty little motherfucker of a storm coming, aimed, as near as I can tell, directly at my house. It’s been 50 degrees all day today, so a lot of the snow has melted (remember, we got a foot of snow a couple of weeks ago, and most of it was still around) and it’s supposed to start raining pretty much any time now. Then the temperature is going to start dropping, so that by the time school starts it’s going to be below freezing, and all that water is going to start turning to ice, along with whatever “wintry mix” has been dropped on us up until then. Estimates for how much snow we’re going to get tomorrow have ranged from five inches to over a foot; I think they’ve mostly settled in the 6-9″ range, but all day tomorrow is going to be ugly as hell.

Oh, and 30 mph winds through basically all of this. So all sorts of shit will be falling out of the sky and it will be falling sideways.

The question, of course, is this: tomorrow afternoon is going to be a clusterfuck. Tomorrow morning, on the other hand, might involve slippery roads but ought to be otherwise manageable. We are currently under a wind advisory, a flood watch, and a winter storm warning, all at the same time. Do we think the schools possess the necessary ability to think ahead required to cancel school in the morning, before things get bad? Or are we just going to have kids stranded at school tomorrow afternoon in the middle of a major blizzard? Stay tuned.

In other news, sometime in the next couple of days, I’m getting another Afghan student. Another girl, which I’m going to assume is good, because it means Fatima might have someone she can talk to, assuming the two of them share a common language. From what I’m told the new girl doesn’t speak any English either. I’m trying to treat this as a good thing; hopefully the two of them will get along well enough (and be able to talk to each other) that they might be able to help each other learn English, because thus far most of what I’ve been trying to do has fared … poorly.

Let’s cross our fingers.

In which that’s enough, thanks

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

It’s not necessary to point out to me that there are parts of the country that have it far, far worse than northern Indiana does right now, and I’ve already done the “go to a hotel for a night because it’s freezing outside and the power is out” thing this year, so believe me, I get it. And the snow is drifty and powdery, and that’s the deepest part of the driveway, and a foot away there might have been 6″ of snow and a foot away from that it might have been back up to 15″. I figure the average depth of the driveway was around a foot of snow or so, maybe a bit more. The last time I had to clear the driveway there was only six or seven inches of the stuff but it was incredibly dense and wet, and that was a far more exhausting job than this was.

It sucked anyway.

We had a snow day today, such as it is; I found out halfway through 3rd hour that apparently on “snow days” I’m not expected to actually do Meets with my students. I shrugged and did the rest of them anyway. Tomorrow is Wednesday, which is supposed to be asynchronous (ie, no Meets) so that we can attend meetings and go to trainings; there have been no trainings remotely relevant to Math teachers for about two months and I cancelled the 8th grade team meeting because we’ve really only had two days of school since the last one. Combine that with the fact that I got caught up on my grading yesterday and my day is rather startlingly open, which I would normally regard as a good thing but I am definitely casting a wary glance at anyway at the moment.

This happened today, too, right outside my office window and conveniently in between classes:

I got another video of him that was closer, but this also lets you see some of the crows that were flying around (and making enough noise that they were the reason I looked around the window in the first place;) there were at least a dozen of them that I could see, and the hawk gave not one thin damn what they were doing. I wasn’t able to get a good look at what he was eating; it occurs to me that there are probably remains under the tree but I’m not going out there to look right now. I *think* this is the second time I’ve spotted this dude in my yard and I still haven’t been able to get a clear look at him– the first time he was chilling in a bush while I was taking the garbage out but he flew away before I could get a good picture. If he comes back a third time, I’m naming him.

(It occurs to me that I don’t really know where all the toads go during wintertime, so he might be eating a Deathwish. Best bet given that it was broad daylight is probably a ground squirrel or a chipmunk, but who the hell knows.)

Stay warm, y’all.

In which we’re all gonna die

Luther M. Siler2 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.