Tag: storms

In before the power goes out

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

We are expecting cataclysmic rain for the next couple of days, and I’m genuinely wondering if I’m about to get another power-outage day off from summer school. Tonight should be manageable, but Wednesday genuinely looks horrifying, and I’m not even in the part of the state that’s going to get hit the hardest, although I will be if the storm track shifts northward even just a little bit.

I spent— brace yourself— the entire afternoon watching the World Cup, and liveblogging the entire thing, so if such a thing might entertain you feel free to head over to my Bluesky account. In accordance with my entire life history, both of the teams I supported lost. I started off neutral on the Norway-Iraq match, but for some reason my allegiances shifted quickly once the match actually started.

Anyway, not a ton else going on right now. I finished Monika Kim’s Molka, and if you liked her first book you will like this one. Maybe not quite as much as The Eyes Are The Best Part— the book is essentially telling two stories at once and they don’t knit together as well as I’d like— but still pretty solid.

This has been a weird day

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I got plenty of sleep last night but it feels like it didn’t count for some reason, my wife and I went out shopping for a while in the afternoon, the heat got to me way more than it should have, and now I’m staring out the window waiting to see if apocalypse storm is going to hit us or not. My brother is in the north Chicago suburbs and sent me video of the ridiculous hailstorm that hit his place; I think what smacked him is going south of us, but it’s supposed to get fun soon and the internet’s already gone out once just for shits and giggles.

A long way of saying I’m not bothering with a full post tonight again because if I do the internet will likely cut out part way through it anyway. See y’all tomorrow.

Still raining!

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

We’re in the midst of Round Two of apocalyptic hellstorms, although as far as I know there haven’t been any trees knocked down nearby, but we did have to go into the basement for half an hour or so because of a tornado warning. One way or another, I’m half-expecting the power to go out again any minute now (we were out from about 1:00 in the morning Sunday night to yesterday afternoon, and spent Monday night in a hotel room) so I’m going to cut this short so I can turn my computer off. I do owe you a review of Galileo’s Daughter; the short version is that I’m starting to really enjoy reading biographies of geniuses.

10 minutes on a Sunday afternoon

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized7 Comments

I think today was the closest I’ve ever come to telling everyone in the house to head for the basement without an actual tornado warning. The top video is out my front window; I saw the first tree across the road fall almost immediately when the wind started, and missed the second one. My wife saw the tree fall in our back yard (second picture) which is the second time that our neighbors behind us have had a tree fall into our yard, thus becoming, by Indiana law, our problem.

The final picture is from maybe 20 minutes later, rain still falling, as every Hoosier-ass dad in the neighborhood and their dogs went outside to wander around and look at the carnage. I may hop in the car soon and see how the rest of the area looks; supposedly there are a lot of power outages nearby but we’re fine.

Yikes.

Staring out the window

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

…no, I’m not giving you a picture, as it’s dark outside, but the district sent us all home today with an email darkly suggesting we “prepare for a delay or cancellation” tomorrow, as the entire region is expected to be blanketed in ice tonight, and given that fact, I have absolutely no intention of doing any lesson planning tonight, so I’d prefer if they would just get it over with and cancel something. The smaller and more rural districts are already starting to pull triggers, so … let’s just do it now, okay? I want to know when to set my alarm for tomorrow, dammit. 

In which I am bad at the subject I teach

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.

But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated. 

You would be wrong.

I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.

I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.

And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.

Oh, Ricky, you’re so fine

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t even think it’s raining outside yet— and you might notice the typical St. Joe Valley Weather Shield wrapped protectively around South Bend at the moment– but the snowfall tonight is supposed to be just ugly enough to raise thoughts of … well … The Good Thing Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. Go sacrifice something to Winter Storm Ricardo, please.

Uh-oh

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We may, or may not, have a blizzard coming, depending on which weather service you’re looking at right now and whether you’re looking at where I live or where I work. The weird thing is that where I live is under a winter storm warning for tomorrow at 4 AM through Thursday at 10 AM, during which we might get five to ten inches of snow, but the forecast doesn’t predict that. Where I work has word-for-word the exact same forecast but without the winter storm warning.

I am assuming that lake effect fuckery is involved somehow, as lake effect snow is famous for dumping a foot of snow on a path two miles wide and barely touching anything on either side. This leads one to wonder, though, just how screwed I’m going to be if the lake effect band lands on my house, or between me and work, but not at work.

I’d kind of prefer it to move a bit to the east, is what I’m saying.

Honestly, I’d kind of prefer to not have a snow day this early in my tenure at the new school, particularly since, for various bad reasons, I have to prepare 2/3 of my kids tomorrow for a test on Thursday, one that was scheduled before I arrived and which they have to take anyway. I had talks with all of my classes today about how I was planning on integrating their previous (miserable) grades with the Post-My-Arrival grades, as they’re all surprisingly concerned about it. And it’s 7:08 and I really ought to get to writing tomorrow’s lesson plans so that we can have a snow day or a two hour delay and everything can be all screwed up.

Whee!

(Day 2 proceeded with much the same pleasantry as Day 1. So far? This was absolutely the right call, other than the fucking commute.)