Proof of life (Welcome to Indiana)

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

As you are no doubt fully aware if you’ve been around here for a while, I am bad at Hot. I am especially bad at the first Hot of the season, and it’s been over eighty degrees every day this week. My classroom is entirely interior, with no windows and really no way to get air to move around. The mornings haven’t been bad, but by the end of the day it has been fucking rough in my classroom. And for the most part I have been getting home from work this week and dying. I haven’t even had the energy to read at night, really, which almost never happens; watching a video on my phone has been about all I’ve been capable of.

You will not be surprised to learn that we have one more day of eighty degree temperatures coming tomorrow … and then Monday it is supposed to snow.

Oh, Ricky, you’re so fine

Luther M. Siler

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.

Here it comes

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

We’re expecting up to a foot of snow, starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday, and tomorrow is the last day of school before Winter Break. No one will be there and it will be fine. And then God will dump a ton of snow on my house so that no one can come talk to me for a couple of days at least, and possibly moving our planned Saturday Christmas dinner to Sunday, which is actual Christmas, which would suit me just fine.

All I need is to get home before the snow starts tomorrow. No problem, right?

Uh-oh

Luther M. Siler

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.)

In which these are not the giraffes you’re looking for

Luther M. Siler

I have sung the praises of Potawatomi Zoo more than once in this space; our local zoo is genuinely a highlight of northern Indiana and we’ve been members for quite some time. They’ve recently acquired four new giraffes and have spent a lot of money extensively renovating a large swath of the zoo to construct a proper habitat for them. The zoo is typically closed during the winter, but once a month or so they have Zoo Days anyway, where they open for a few hours, rain or shine, and well, you see whatever you might be able to see. However, today was the first day that seeing the giraffes was possible, and the high today was a rather unseasonable 68 degrees.

We were going to the zoo.

Unfortunately, so was everyone else in South Bend. When we got to the zoo the line to get in was a block long, and the parking lot is a mess under the absolute best of circumstances, and “perfect Spring day featuring the public’s first real chance to see four hotly-anticipated new animals” is, uh, not the best of circumstances. So we did not go to the zoo today. And as soon as we decided we weren’t waiting in the line, much less whatever horror we might have encountered inside the zoo (they were limiting access to the animals, letting in a limited number of people for 10-minute blocks, so who knows how many a “limited number” is) we immediately drove past two perfect parking spaces.

We came home, opened all the windows, and I put shorts on.

There is a 60% chance of snow on Monday. Because Indiana.

If you want to feel like a celebrity for a little while, post the words “looking for an artist” on Twitter. Because holy shit are there a lot of people out there who very clearly have programmed a bot to reply instantly to any use of that sequence of words. And the funny thing is that I can tell from referrals how many people clicked back to the article, where I clearly describe what I’m looking for, and the vast majority of the 43 people who responded to that tweet or however many more who immediately DMed me did not (possibly because they were not human) click through the link on the Tweet to see what I was looking for.

Hilariously, however, I got a recommendation in comments almost immediately, and while I haven’t contacted the artist yet her style is exactly what I had in mind, so I think I’ve got somebody. I’ll take some time tomorrow or later today to go through all the comments I got and then delete the original Tweet just to do my diligence, but … man, asking the Internet for something worked this time.