This is the part where I get a lot of stuff done.
Or maybe get dressed and take a shower.
Get ready.
Productivity happening.
Eventually.
Tag: winter
Woohoo 2!
School’s been cancelled tomorrow, because it’s supposed to be like ten below zero at 6:00 tomorrow morning, meaning that I can either stay home and work on the book (the responsible choice) or stay home and play video games (the slightly more awesome choice.) At some point I will probably have to blow off the driveway in astonishingly cold weather, which I could be happier about, but… yeah. No school! Whee!
I’ll try and post something actually interesting later tonight.
Uuuuuuggghhhhh
Went to bed at 8:30 last night. Absolutely no way I can miss work this week. I can’t wait until Friday night to get sick?
On priorities
It’s been a bad few days at work– not in the “come home and pull my hair out” sort of way, but in the “come home and curse the world for letting this happen” sort of way, which is in some ways worse. We had– did I mention this?– the first real snowstorm of the season on Thursday of last week (it snowed on Halloween, too, and I know I mentioned that, but it didn’t stick) and it’s been really cold and intermittently snowy for the last few days. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten below zero wind chill when I left for work this morning, and most of the districts in northern Indiana and southern Michigan were at least on a two-hour delay today. (Not ours. We are a hardier folk than most.)
The thing about cold weather? Depending on how charitable you’re feeling, it either makes it harder to ignore how poor most of our families are or makes it more visible. It becomes real clear real fast which families can’t afford to pay the bills once it starts snowing. If a kid shows up at school in the same polo shirt that he was wearing (and I mean literally the same polo shirt) when it was seventy degrees outside, chances are that kid’s family can’t afford to keep the heat on.
There are an awful lot of kids in this building who don’t seem to have winter coats. An awful lot. And we ended up having to send our social worker over to a couple different houses where it turns out the heat isn’t on at all.
You may be wondering what the picture at the top of this post has to do with anything. Not much, except as an exemplar of my general lack of fitness as a human being. We’ve spent the last few days at work with the problems of poverty full and center, right? I got home yesterday to discover that one of the dogs had done that to Kitty.
Kitty is my son’s favorite toy. Kitty’s the stuffed animal he screams for when he hits his head or falls down or is scared. And the dogs– I have my suspicion which one– had destroyed it.
The rage was immediate and incandescent. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that angry at one of my pets before. I could have killed the little bastards, and I ended up shoving both of them into the back yard until I calmed down, which should have taken a lot less time than it did.
My kid’s three. He’s got his own room. He’s got a big house with blankets and heat and food and plenty of toys and books and all four of his grandparents and his uncle and his aunt are in town and he has two parents who are still married and hold steady jobs. He’s fine. And despite my worries to the contrary, when we told him about Kitty, he was basically okay with it, although my wife did promise him she’d try to fix him.
I probably ought to find something worth getting angry about.
REBLOG: Creamy Tomato Soup With Tortellini
Other than discovering at the last second that we were out of garlic and doubling the recipe, I made this without modification. Delicious– especially with bread and butter.
On how NOT to talk to parents
It snowed rather a lot, and rather unexpectedly as well. I had no idea that it was snowing until I opened my garage door. It’s a bit of a mystery how I managed to not look through any of the three windows in my bedroom, but I did it. I am normally able to leave the house around 7:00 AM and arrive at work with a cup of McDonald’s coffee in my hand at around 7:25. I wanted to be in by 7:15 today, so I left ten minutes early, at about 6:50. It took 54 minutes to get to work. Highways were shut down, cars were spinning off the road everywhere, and, as it turns out, there were a number of minor school bus accidents as well.
Keep in mind: everyone who lives here drives in snow for half the damn year. Or at least what feels like half the damn year. It was slick as hell outside; even taking the approach to my school very carefully I still managed to miss the damn parking lot, and even at lunchtime my anti-lock brakes kicked in on the very first turn out of the lot. It was shitty outside today, people.
Anyway. Back to those minor school bus accidents. The district made the decision very early in the day to cancel all after-school activities and all field trips (I don’t know that there actually were any, mind you) and other things requiring transportation during the day as well except for that which was absolutely necessary to get kids to and from school. So they decided to do an all-call to every parent in the corporation, because, well, that kind of decision is going to affect a lot of kids.
Important: I have not heard the all-call, but I’ve seen the carnagey aftermath, so it’s possible that I’m slightly misrepresenting this? But apparently the all-call included, in addition to the cancellation information, the fact that there had been “several” minor bus accidents in the morning but– and this was apparently delivered with a cheery tone of voice, which given the person who I know sent it, doesn’t surprise me– there were “no serious injuries.”
Guess which words every fucking parent who got the call heard? “Bus accident” and “injuries.” The goddamned phones were ringing off the hook all day. In addition to the usual complement of assholes who don’t answer the phone then don’t listen to their voicemail and just call the number back without knowing who it is they’re calling– those are always fun– we got a number of irate phone calls from parents who were mad because we hadn’t called them to let them know that their kids were in a bus accident.
Because, see, they weren’t.
One parent was even angry that we hadn’t notified her that her child had been injured in a bus accident, and wanted to know what hospital she was at. If her child doesn’t pass ISTEP, the school is blamed, people.
Not having an “I love my job” day right now, guys.
How I’ll hate going out in the storm
The predicted Hell Blizzard sorta fizzled, at least around here (I haven’t been home long enough to see what the news has to say about other places) but man did it leave some pretty behind:
Freestanding icicles in the parking lot. They were apparently attached to the bottom of a car and somehow just stayed there when the car pulled away.
It hasn’t really been snowing since this morning, but the blowing snow is crazy and it’s really sticking to all the trees. This might be one of my favorite pictures from this winter:
It’s supposed to be fifty degrees again by early next week, of course.