Tag: weather

I can’t believe I don’t know this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.

I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.

Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?

I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.

I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.

(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)

It’s been snowing and I’ve been reading

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I decided that I needed to reread The Will of the Many before letting myself dive into Book Two, and having spent more or less the entire day reading while snow piled up outside, I think I made the right decision. That said, I’m so far behind on my TBR that it’s become a religion, and reading anything that isn’t contributing to that pile getting smaller hurts me deep in my soul. At least it was equally good on the second read; I was surprised just now to look at my best books of 2024 list and discover it wasn’t on it.

Either way, it’s on to the next one; we’re supposed to get about another full day of snow before the storm stops, and I’m actually worried about losing school on Monday– with a test coming on Friday and finals in three weeks, I need every second of instruction I can get between now and winter break. Pretty sure I’m gonna blink and those three weeks are gonna be gone. I actually don’t want to lose the day. There’s apparently another storm coming Monday night, too? Fun for everyone, I guess.

In accordance …

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… 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.

Well, that was fun

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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.

This was a really long week

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It wasn’t necessarily a bad week, mind you; it just feels like it was a thousand years long. There are somehow only two weeks left in the first quarter, which means that in the main this school year is blazing by, but … man. We got a surprise two-hour delay today when dense fog briefly rendered most of northern Indiana impossible to travel in, which was nice; the combination of the delay, Friday, payday, and doughnuts in the staff lounge this morning had most of us speculating that it might somehow be all of our birthdays.

And then I have spent the vast majority of the three and a half hours since getting home with a cat asleep on my lap (awesome) and alternately browsing TikTok (less awesome) or struggling to stay awake. Dinner was a bunch of grapes. It is 8:14 as I’m typing this (on my phone, with a cat in my lap) and being entirely asleep by 9:00 is not at all an unwelcome thought.

What the hell, Indiana

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

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.

This has been a weird day

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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!

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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.