Tag: winter

A tale of two pictures

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Television, Writing1 Comment

Picture One is my front yard.  Note the mostly clear deep blue sky and the snow-free, mostly-dry driveway.  It is nearly fifty degrees outside and beautiful.  The snow is melting as fast as snow can; it looks like it’s raining by the door to my back yard, where the eaves are not quite angled properly.

My phone just blew up about a “severe” winter storm watch due to begin at midnight Tuesday night.

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The second picture, I think, needs no explanation.  Other than, maybe, BAM.

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There is a note in the letter along with the check sternly warning me to have this deposited within five (5) business days.  Ha.  Are there really people who get checks this large and go Oh, I’ll get to that when I have a chance?

I may be rather quiet today, other than this; I did something horrible to the muscles in my abdomen sometime last night that the paranoid/hypochondriac part of my brain is insisting is, like, twelve hernias and the more sensible part of me figures is probably some sort of muscle pull.  At any rate I plan on spending the rest of the day lying down and continuing to mostly avoid the interwebs until I’ve seen True Detective tonight.  Note that if you’ve left a comment anywhere on the site I haven’t seen it yet and won’t until tonight.  Regular angry posteration should resume tomorrow as expected.

Snow geology

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography4 Comments

2014-02-08 10.21.20A neat thing you might not be aware of about snow, if you live somewhere where it doesn’t snow very often:  under the right circumstances, it forms clear striations like rock does, if you happen to get a decent break in between storms and different kinds of snow fall in the different storms.  Note here just how clearly you can see the break between Major Winter Storm 1 and Major Winter Storm 2.

No real point, I just thought it was neat.

 

In which I’ll just leave this here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching, Writing5 Comments

2014-02-04 21.35.39…unexplained.  And maybe ripped off from somewhere?  I hope not?

Let’s see.  When I got up this morning, I was expecting to discover that I was going to have to go to work.  Our final forecast before I went to bed was that we were going to get between three and six inches of snow overnight, and unless it’s paired with crippling cold or some other external circumstance three to six inches of snow just isn’t enough to close school around here.  I woke up at six, checked my phone, and discovered that not only were we open, but so were the other two big districts in the area.  Generally if one of the “Big Three” closes, it seems to create a domino effect (probably, mind you, entirely imaginary) where the other two quickly follow suit.  I lazed around a bit, looking at Facebook and Twitter, and then randomly went back and looked at the closed list again.

Big District #1 had closed in the five minutes I was web surfing.  And make no mistake: waiting until past 6 AM to close is a late decision.  But… still.  Domino effect?

I find that it doesn’t matter what I say at night, and yesterday I very much did not want school to close.  At 6 am, when I’m in bed and warm?  Close close close close close I don’t wanna go to work.

I gave up at 6:25 and finally jumped in the shower, but the list got a lot longer fast after Big District #1 closed.  #2 and ours never followed suit, though.  I’ve got my eye on Friday now; I’m expecting school tomorrow, but it’s looking like we’ve got yet another wave of subzero temperatures heading our way Thursday night and Friday morning and the cold will close us a lot quicker than the snow will.

Driving to work was fun, too; what looked like three inches in our driveway turned out to be seven or eight (turns out the huge ice dams on either side of the driveway– which, as you can see in the last post are nearly two feet deep now, are seriously screwing with my ability to estimate how much new snowfall we’ve gotten) and getting home involved destroying nearly two feet of built-up plowed ice at the foot of my driveway before my wife got home with her non-4X4 car.  

I still like winter better than summer, but I think I’m ready for spring now.

Two quick notes: if you’re a comic book person and you didn’t buy G. Willow Wilson’s relaunch of Ms. Marvel today, get your ass to a comic store before they close and get one now.  That good.  Also, I think I just figured out what BA 6 is about.

Man, fuck this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography3 Comments

20140205-164558.jpg

In case you were wondering…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

2014-02-01 12.12.11…the golf course is closed today, I think.

 

Monday miscellany

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Music, Television1 Comment

A whole lot of stuff today, most of which isn’t worth its own post and I don’t want to have 300 posts today anyway, so you get a bunch of bullet points.  Enjoy some commentary and a bit of open self-promotion:

  • The entire northern part of the state is on a travel warning again and school has already been called off for Tuesday.  Both my wife and my son are home; we’d have had to pick him up from day care (they closed at noon because of the travel ban) and I had to clear the driveway before getting anywhere was even possible.  I figure Wednesday is downgraded to “doubtful” at this point from “I’m sure we’ll be back” earlier today.
  • Despite the headline of the previous post, I’m actually not upset about the weather, nor am I angry with the various people posting “Awesome out here in California!” or “Hey, it’s 65 degrees here in Florida!” people.  I prefer cold weather to hot under all circumstances, period.  I admit if I still lived in Chicago, where there’s nowhere to put the damn snow, I’d be miserable, but clearing the driveway every once in a while isn’t actually that big of a hardship– I’d rather plow the driveway than mow the damn lawn any day of the week.  That said, I’m growing ill about the lost time before the ISTEP test.  I really am going to be writing a letter to the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent to advocate for pushing back the test at least a week.  It’ll be interesting to see how contractually bound we are to the dates we’re scheduled to.  Pearson doesn’t give a damn about the contract, mind you, but I suspect our state officials will.
  • The Internet is for porn; everyone knows that.  I finally figured out what Twitter is for last night; Twitter is for snark.  Watching the Grammys, for example, isn’t terribly exciting (exceptions in a moment).  Watching the Grammys and mocking it on the Internet along with half of the world is hilarious.  I know I talk about Saladin Ahmed a lot around here, but Christ the guy was on fire last night and it was hysterical.
  • What Twitter appears to be less good for: driving traffic to websites, at least as far as I can tell.  Nobody clicks on links in Twitter.  I’ve had blog links retweeted by celebrities three times– Cherie Priest RTed my “10 best books of 2013” post and both Lyrics Born and Lateef retweeted links to yesterday’s post about them (also: Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker and Cherie Priest read something on my blog, squeeeeeee) and it led to maybe four hits from Twitter yesterday and maybe six when Priest did it.
  • That said, I have 93 followers right now and I want 100 today.  Follow my twitter feed!  There’s a button right over there on the right!  I’m funny sometimes, I promise!
  • Also, I should hit 1,337 blog followers today, which makes my inner Internet nerd happy.
  • Speaking of naked self-promotion, note the “Short Fiction” page that’s been added to the header up there.  If you’re a newer reader there’s a couple of stories up there that you may not have seen.  I’ll be beefing this up in the future, especially if the summer writing grant goes through– I find out about that in less than a month.
  • Back to the Grammys:  I don’t usually watch them; the Grammys actually are what people say the Academy Awards are and usually they are best ignored.  I’m glad I caught last night’s show, though, if only because it was so amazingly, unashamedly weird.  Steven Tyler’s weirdly inappropriate affection made Smokey Robinson want to put on the Ring of Doom and bamf off the stage.  Cyndi Lauper was painfully, obviously, amazingly drunk.  Pharrell’s hat was just obvious and amazing.  The Macklemore/Queen Latifah/Madonna thing was weird and creepy and somehow both massively inappropriate and inspiring at the same time– like, Latifah’s gay, right?  Everyone knows that?  She’s got a long-term partner.  So you have the straight white guy, and it’s not like the Grammys repeatedly recognizing white rappers over more talented black rappers (coughKendrickLamarcough) isn’t already a problem, and he’s rapping about how being gay is great, then you pull out the mostly-closeted gay lady to marry a whole bunch of people, both straight and gay couples and a couple of notably interracial ones as well, and CBS does their damnedest to only focus on the straight couples while it’s happening, and meanwhile Madonna is there for some reason and she’s leaning on a cane and looks older than Betty White.
  • Somebody– can’t find it right now– said that Macklemore’s unique talent was managing to come off as a douchebag even when he’s being perfectly sincere and saying things you agree with.  That’s not far off from the truth, near as I can tell.
  • The Awkward Taylor Swift Dancing tumblr.  You’re welcome.
  • Good stuff, though:  The Pharrell/Daft Punk/Stevie Wonder/Nile Rodgers collaboration was awesome, but holy shit were they overshadowed by the Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar’s mashup of Radioactive and m.A.A.d city
    earlier in the show, a performance so outstanding that by rights it should have ended the entire ceremony on the spot.  Like, the Grammy people should have just sent everybody the fuck home and released the rest of the awards by email or something.  I wasn’t terribly familiar with Lamar before the show; I downloaded his (also Grammy-nominated, but it didn’t win, see above bit on Macklemore) album on the spot.  Sadly, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet; I’ll report back.  That shit blew me away.
  • Cutting to that poor little country girl right after the Lamar/Imagine Dragons performance was the cruelest decision of the evening and I can’t believe they did it.  They went from a showstopping performance straight to something that was deliberately staged to look like a show in a poorly-attended country bar, complete with lame Christmas lights sewn into clothes and fucking neon cacti, and meanwhile the audience was wiping sweat off their foreheads and going to the bathroom.  I may download her album too just out of pity, if she hasn’t retired from music out of sheer embarrassment by now.
  • My wife and I are both pretty digitally connected people, right?  So much so that we can’t really tell each other things that have happened anymore without beginning with the phrase “You’ve probably already heard this, but…”.  We had a particularly bad example of this this morning, one that may well be a sign that the two of us need to reevaluate our lives:  I cleared off the driveway and let her know that I was going to go take a shower, then as I was drying off afterward she knocked on the door to the bathroom and said “Hey, you probably already know this, but school’s cancelled tomorrow.”  Because apparently it is reasonable to my wife that I’m on my phone checking Facebook and Twitter while I’m showering, or that perhaps I check my phone before drying off.  Which entertains the crap out of me.
  • No, shut up, I didn’t know yet.

That’s enough for now.  I’m bound and determined to get The Benevolence Archives 5 done today, so you might see another post from that this evening sometime.

Winter Wonderland, if wonderlands sucked

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

2014-01-27 08.40.52

Woke up to the sound of a bathroom door shutting and realized that the wife and son were still in the house after all– there’s ten damn inches of blown snow in the driveway and the county’s under a travel watch again.  So have some pictures of my back yard through a window.

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Vortextual analysis

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized8 Comments

So, this is the “before” image, only taken from outside with the sun out rather than through my dining room window:

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(Man.  That was literally a hipshot; I had my headphones on, with the cord running through my hoodie, and rather than untangle everything I just pulled my phone out of my pocket, pointed it at the snow at more or less waist height and took the picture.  It came out prettier than a lot of deliberate photos I’ve taken.  Wow.)

After looks like this:

IMG_1054I really hadn’t realized when I went to bed last night how bad the snow was going to be; if I had, I’d have gotten out there and cleared the couple of inches that were already on the driveway, since that older compacted snow made getting rid of the newer stuff twice as annoying.

That said, this is mostly blown snow and not new-fallen snow; note that it was six or seven inches deep against the garage (which you can’t see in either picture) but really thin off to the right over there, and toward where the driveway meets the street there was probably an eight or nine inch swing from the left side of the driveway to the right.  Some of that is going to be because the street got plowed before I got out there, but this measure was taken quite a distance from the road:

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Judging from the weather reports for the next few days, I’d be really surprised if I was back at school before Wednesday of next week, since Monday and Tuesday’s cold are supposed to make yesterday look mild– and it was definitely temperature that closed us yesterday and not snowfall.

Anybody want to help me start campaigning with the state to push the ISTEP test back a couple of weeks?  Extra school days in June really don’t help anybody.  I need the time before the test– at this point I’d almost rather lose Spring Break; at least that would give me some class days before the multiple choice administration of the test.  I just hope I stay healthy for the spring; I’m not going to be able to lose a single minute between now and ISTEP.

Shit.