Tag: weather

It’s bloody hot

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

That’s the thermometer in my back yard, at 7:37 PM, and you’ll note that thermometers don’t know what a “heat index” is, so I can only assume it’s the literal apocalypse outside right now. It’s supposed to be like this all week. I’m not excited about it.

I watched both World Cup matches this afternoon; Brazil-Japan was exciting despite ending the wrong way; Germany-Paraguay was a textbook example of Everything Americans Think is Wrong with Soccer, not only featuring a truly ludicrous amount of flopping (if I took a drink every time I said “you’re fine, get up,” I’d be dead) but ending in a shootout where the pivotal miss on the German team’s part, the kick that more or less decided the game, soared ten feet above the goal.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable when I suggest that, given a stationary ball and no one defending, any professional soccer player should be able to hit the fucking goal. Someone out there– possibly not someone reading this, but someone— will surely disagree with me on that. I could put a ball in the goal from that distance when I was playing soccer at ten. The goalkeeper is basically relying on vibes and luck to choose which way he jumps; he’s only barely relevant. All you have to do is hit the goal. The damned thing is twenty-four feet wide and eight feet tall. 192 square feet. Come the fuck on. And he wasn’t the only player who missed the goal! He was just the worst example.

The dude who missed that shot should walk into the ocean, is what I’m saying. Imagine NBA games that ended with each team shooting free throws and one of them airballs. That’s the rough equivalent here. Maybe one player from the opposing team gets to throw a ball at the ball to account for the goalie.(*)

The third game of the day features my Netherlands; I will have to cheer for a European team against an African one, which rankles a bit, but they’re my team and that’s that. I just wish I remembered why.

(*) No, an even better example: a football (our football) game where the game was decided on five extra point attempts. Any kicker who missed that badly wouldn’t make it off the field alive, and if he did he wouldn’t be taking his kicking foot with him.

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Time is meaningless

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

My schedule lately is messing with my head, and I don’t like it at all. There’s something deeply weird about it being 12:30 and being home from work for the day. Like, I’ll get home, eat some lunch, fiddle around on my phone, read a bit … and then look around and it’s only 2:30 somehow and my wife isn’t even home from work yet, and mentally my day is over, and then it just, like, starts over again somehow? I’m doing this weird thing where I’m somehow packing two days into every day, and as a result I continue to not have the vaguest idea what day of the week it is at any given time. I thought maybe it was just an artifact of my wife being out of town for a week, but it’s still going on on whatever day today is, so clearly it’s gonna stick around for a minute.

Meanwhile, the horror hell storm that we heard about for two straight days appears to have curved south, and so far my social media hasn’t filled up with videos of tornadoes, so hopefully that’s because there hasn’t actually been any destruction and not just that I haven’t heard about it. There was all kinds of chatter about losing tomorrow again because of power issues, but at least as of right now the northern part of the state appears to have been spared. We’ll see what happens. For all I know, the kids will stay home anyway. We’ll see, I guess.

Also, I just found out that this exists, and I’m experiencing Big Weird Feelings right now, so I’m gonna go.

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.

Crabbersaurus Rex

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

Tornado sirens tossed us into the basement for about 45 minutes last night, and as a Midwestern dad I was contractually required to go outside the very moment the warning stopped to check it out. I was greeted with this weirdness: a little bit of evidence of rain but nothing currently falling, no wind, and near-constant lightning with very little thunder. A dad more committed to his Midwesternness would have gone out during the storm, but my wife is out of town this week and I’m trying to be good.

I woke up this morning and discovered that summer school wasn’t happening, as apparently there were more widespread power outages east of us. I have spent the day since then gradually sinking into a worse and worse mood for some reason.

Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly why; Earth has its first trillionaire, or at least its first official one (call me when Elon Musk goes on hajj and destabilizes Egypt’s entire economy along the way) and meanwhile literally everything is getting worse for everyone else all the time, with no sign that the pattern is ever going to reverse itself. Every opinion I have about Musk is unprintable, even by my standards. I tried to watch the livestream of Trump’s name being torn off of the Kennedy Center and they had to stop work because of the rain (the remnants of last night’s storm, maybe?) and didn’t get a single letter taken down. That kind of day. I can’t even rant properly, for fuck’s sake.

I need someone to face a consequence for something. Anyone. For anything.

Pfah.

In which it happened again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

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 need everyone to understand this

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It is snowing again.

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.

In which that’s not good enough

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

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.

Snnooooowwwwwwww

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography6 Comments

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!