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!
Tag: winter
Yep, it’s cold
We haven’t gotten any substantial snow yet, but I think the idea is it’s supposed to mostly roll in tomorrow and Sunday, so we’ll see what happens. My classes went fine today; turns out that if you tell kids you’ll give them extra credit if they show their pets (or any nearby object they’re willing to pretend is a pet) on camera, they show up for Meets, and then they even stick around afterwards.
There’s a fairly high risk of school being cancelled Monday as well, depending on how shit the next couple of days go; I’m really hoping if that happens they just cancel school and add a day to the end of the year. Today went well but I feel like two synchronous days on either side of a weekend are not both going to go well. We’ll see, I suppose?
After a big traffic spike for the last few months of 2025, including a lot of traffic from China and Singapore (but also elevated traffic from the US) I’ve been struggling to hit 100 page views lately. I’ve finally got access to Google Analytics– which, weirdly, happened the same day the traffic fell through the floor– and I’m struggling to understand what I’m looking at, to be honest. Like, right now, Google is telling me I’ve had 9 “active users” in the last half hour, but my hits on WordPress Stats haven’t moved? Ultimately I’m aware that none of this matters since the site isn’t monetized at all, but just for my own shits and giggles I’d like to know how these things overlap and intersect, y’know? Analytics isn’t super forthcoming with definitions, unfortunately.
Also, I thought I was supposed to be able to see what search terms were leading people my way, and what referrers, and so far I haven’t been able to dig that information out. I feel like it should be have been simple. Like, what the hell does this mean?
Sixteen thousand “engaged sessions,” of zero seconds of engagement time each, but … less than a hundred “page views”?
Somebody just download this shit into my brain so I don’t have to work to understand it. I’m tired, dammit.
In accordance with prophecy
No school tomorrow, anywhere, basically— I’d bet close to 100% of the state’s districts will be closed tomorrow. I’m expecting to be snowed in all weekend and we’ll see what happens Monday.
I got all my prep for online learning done at work, so I’m trying to claw through Lord Of Chaos tonight. Everybody behave, mmmk?
I can’t believe I don’t know this
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.)
Well, that was fun
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.
What the hell, Indiana
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.
FFS are you KIDDING ME
So the amount of snow in this image is not necessarily a guaranteed close, but I’m hearing that some places are predicting up to ten inches of snow tomorrow? And I somehow(*) didn’t find out about it until getting to the comic shop after school? I haven’t been able to verify that number, but that dark blue blob is directly over both me and my commute. I walked out of work today telling everyone who would listen that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was coming in tomorrow, because not only can I still not breathe but I got to play Fun With Alternating Chills And Fever all day long, while administering ILEARN to every single student I have, making this an absolutely stellar day from start to finish.
My son– have I mentioned this around here? Maybe not– has been sick for most of the last two months, and has missed a shit ton of school, and we had a meeting with his advisory teacher and the school counselor at 5:00(**), which I masked up for. Then I got home and took a combined Covid/Influenza A/Influenza B test, which was negative for everything, and then after that my thermometer told me my temperature was 98.4, so I’m about to fight all the medical technology in the house.
The question now is whether I go through with the original plan and just call in sick tonight, which gives me a chance of having a sub tomorrow rather than just hoping for class coverage, but if we get a delay out of the weather I may tough it out and go in, and if we actually get cancelled that would be fantastic, because I could just put up an assignment and then sleep all Goddamn day without taking the day off monitor my email and attend my office hours in case my kids need help. But if I wait until tomorrow morning I’m almost guaranteed no sub, and now that I think about it, if we have a delay, that’ll cancel the ILEARN language arts test that we currently have planned, which will change the schedule, which means what I’m planning on right now won’t work, which means …
… shit, even if I do go to work (worth pointing out: tomorrow will be a shitty day to drop onto a sub if we’re testing) I’m not going to be able to do any planning until I know what the day’s schedule is going to be. So no matter what I’m getting up at regular time and making a decision. And I’d prefer not to call in and then have to cancel the absence. That feels unfair to the hypothetical sub that I may or may not get.
Maybe I’ll just die tonight and then I won’t have to worry about it. Here’s hoping.
(*) This is nonsense, because I know exactly why; administering ILEARN all day meant I wasn’t allowed to have my watch or my phone with me, and monitoring testing all day meant no extraneous web surfing on my computer; I was effectively cut off from any source of information that might have given me this information, especially since I spent my lunch break photocopying work for tomorrow that I may or may not need.
(**) It should be made clear that this was heroic on their parts, because the meeting was so late because his advisor already had an after school commitment, and then both of them decided staying even later was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We weren’t done until nearly six. I would not have agreed to this meeting!
In which I’ve read this book already
I’ll call it 50/50 whether we have a two-hour delay again tomorrow; Michigan schools have already called it due to the cold. We won’t cancel; it’s not going to be that cold, but subzero wind chills during the walking/waiting for the bus hours are dangerous regardless. On top of that, I have what feels like the beginnings of a sinus infection immediately after getting over whatever the hell I had last week, which feels unfair. I absolutely cannot miss any days of work between here and Friday for schedule reasons and I would really prefer to not miss any more days in February at all, so we’re gonna cross our fingers and hope this stays at a simmer until next weekend.
I have written, more or less, that exact post maybe fifteen times in 2025. I’m deliberately avoiding writing about creeping despair, political authoritarianism, or my own slow decline into supervillaindom, which pretty much leaves video games, books, and musing about the weather and being sick. My “Presidents’ Recess” went pretty well, I suppose, and now we enter into the longest stretch of the entire school year with no holidays, as Spring Break isn’t for seven weeks.
It’s entirely possible that I might die. We’ll see.