Tag: weather

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!

Duckery

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.

Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.

Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.

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.