Tag Archives: weather

A coin flip decision…

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Today is another one of our famous 4-hour delays. Personally I hate them. If you go in, the commute takes twice as long and you end up pissing away 4 hours at your desk because 2/3 of the people you need to get anything done decided to stay home. If you stay home, you end up burning off a full day of leave in order to take 4 hours off because of some archaic interpretation of OPM regulations governing time and attendance. It’s the very definition of a winter weather no-win scenario.

Looking out the kitchen window I can see a few trucks are starting to move on what passes for a “main” road in my part of the world. In Ceciltucky that mostly means it’s a road with a yellow line down the middle of it. To get from my place to an actual highway, though, involves a whole lot of little winding country roads that don’t usually see so much as first plow until the mains are cleared. Big Red is certainly sure footed enough to do it, but the real question is do I want to be bothered.

If I weren’t going to have to take part of the day off tomorrow the answer would be a resounding “no.” At least I know I’m not a complete slacker employee because I feel vaguely guilty about taking unscheduled time off even when I don’t have anything particularly pressing that someone else would have to deal while I sat home with my fuzzy slippers on. I’ve got an hour or so before I need to make the final go/no go decision. Right now it’s basically a coin flip decision.

Mental preparation…

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I wasn’t mentally prepared for today. To be more precise I was only mentally prepared to be around for part of the day. The other part, the part starting around noon and moving on towards the end of the day, I was counting on that being a little less cubicle and a little more sitting at home wearing fuzzy slippers and hanging out with the dogs.

I might not work with my hands rending a living from the bowels of the earth, but one thing I can tell you with certitude is I leave the office most days mentally worn out. It’s a different kind of tired, but it’s as real and deep down to the bone as any kind of physical tired I’ve ever been.

The level of tired notwithstanding, I need to do a better job of mentally preparing for Mondays… and I need to stop waking up early to clean off the truck and allow extra time to drive to work just because some jackass with a fancy meteorological degree has determined by casting bones and reading entrails that there could be snow the next morning. Two times out of three it’s painfully obvious they have no idea and I just end up missing out on a goodly fraction of the little sleep I allow myself to get on the average weekday.

Public service…

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It’s going to be damned cold the next few nights. If you have critters that live outside, go ahead and make room for them indoors for a few days until the worst of the cold passes. Unless you have one of a few specific breeds, the vast majority of domestic pets aren’t built to handle this kind of weather.

I’m not suggesting you have to drag every animal in shouting distance to sleep at the foot of your bed, but a basement, barn, garage, really any place that’s heated to a civilized temperature, cuts the wind, and gives them a warm place to ride things out is perfectly acceptable. A nice blanket or good bedding material wouldn’t kill you either, ya know? If you’re too busy or indifferent to be bothered, might I recommend you stop reading now. Seriously. Stop reading. Forget you’ve ever seen my blog. Unfollow me. Unfriend me.

If you can’t be bothered to even take basic care of your animals, I have no use for you and no choice but to declare you a miserable excuse for a human being and a douchenozzle of the highest magnitude.

This concludes tonight’s public service announcement from your kindly Uncle Jeff.

Go forth and sin no more.

Editorial blues…

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I’m editing. That is all. As essential as I know it is to putting out a good, readable product, it’s the part that I hate the most. I know it’s at the very center of the creative process, but there’s something about recovering the same ground two, five, a dozen times that, to me, makes it feel like the most non-productive thing I could spend my time doing.

Add to my generalized hatred of editing the fact that at the moment, I’m trying to do it on a beautiful, blue-skyed, spring day and I hope you can start to see why at this very moment, my heart just isn’t in it. Not to take anything away from the work in progress, but on days like this sitting inside and doing the work is damned hard. I know it’s only going to get harder as the weather gets nicer, though. It’s going to get harder right up to the point I realize it’s 93 degrees and I’m sweating my balls off. Then there’s no place I’ll rather be than in front of the air conditioner getting some long overdue work done.

In this part of the country there isn’t always a long time between frozen tundra and baking asphalt. I’m doing my best to keep the momentum up, but I’m giving up all promises not to get distracted for these few weeks while the weather is nice enough to enjoy.

Mooning…

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Time was I’d drag myself out of bed at all sorts of wild hours just for the possibility of seeing something cool in the night sky. Tonight’s blood moon would definitely qualify as one of those things. Until I started checking out the times of best viewing and doing the math on how much cloud cover there was probably going to be here on the east coast at 3:07 AM EDT. Getting up in the middle of the night to watch something live streaming on my iPad just doesn’t have the same effect. Some things are meant to be done live, preferably with a steaming cup of coffee and a touch of Irish to help pass the time. Since tonight’s show looks like it will be clouded out, I’m going to have to take a pass and satisfy my curiosity with seeing the stream after the fact. It’s a little disappointing that I’ll be missing nature’s big show, but since there will be three more chances in the next year and a half, I’ll roll the dice on seeing the next eclipse, or the one after that, or the one after that. Surely the weather can’t conspire to block out all four of the harbingers of the end of days, right?

2 hours…

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I’ve lost track of the number of snow related 2- and 4-hour delays and closures we’ve had this winter. This morning just adds one more to the tally. The only thing I can say is that “they’ve” been marvelously inconsistent in how they choose to respond to each and every snow event. This morning, for instance, is another two hour delay. That might be the right decision based on conditions where such decisions are being made, but being a guy who lives 45 minutes from the office, my conditions and theirs don’t always correspond. Such is the case this morning. From what I can see of the surface conditions outside, even if I leave two hours later than normal, it’ll be half an hour meetingsdemotivatorbefore I get to a road where I can see blacktop. Based on past experience, a good estimate is that my drive in will take take about twice as long as usual.

After a winter of having delays announced, rescinded, changed, renounced, and extended, my visceral instinct is to give it an old fashioned “screw you guys, I’m staying home” today. Sure, that would mean giving back the two hours of admin time this morning and burning off a full 8 hours of leave. I’ve got a mountain of leave banked, so that’s not really the issue.

The one hang up I have is that at some point this morning I’m supposed to be in a meeting. It’s not a meeting I’m particularly interested in, but it’s mine. And I feel a inexplicable level of guilt at pawning it off on one of my poor unsuspecting colleagues. I don’t know why. There are plenty who have no compunction about taking a day of unscheduled leave and dropping their shit in someone else’s lap to deal with. Still, I hate the idea of being “that guy.”

Of course none of that means at 0800, I won’t make the call, but I want you all to know that I’ll be positively racked with guilt about it if things go that way.

A simple request…

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It was 60 degrees yesterday. I had the windows open taking advantage of a long awaited chance to air the place out – because face it, no matter how often you clean, living with two dogs and a tortoise is going to generate a certain amount of airborne funk no amount of spray cleaners and elbow grease will quite get rid of. Even today, with temperatures in the 40s, it’s a kind reminder than winter can’t maintain it’s grip on the Mid-Altlantic indefinitely.

Then, of course there’s the low rumblings I’ve heard that the cold weather may have a punch or two left in it this year. I’m studiously ignoring every television forecaster and website that’s trying to hype a mid-week winter storm. I don’t care whether it’s a full blown blizzard or just a glancing blow from something hitting New England. It quite simply needs to go away. I’ll be griping and complaining about the heat soon enough, but right now I really just need to feel temperatures in the 60s, hear the weekend hum of lawn equipment, and be able to leave the house in fewer than three layers. I’m a simple man and I don’t think that’s too much to ask from March.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. SnowSleetRain. The dreaded wintery mix. Snow is easy enough. Shovel it aside and go n about your business. Sleet isn’t as forgiving and a hell of a lot harder to get rid of. Rain just makes the whole thing a soggy mess that weighs 17 tones per scoop. Worst of all, the rain melts off the good stuff that justifies extended time off from work. So, yeah, in the little scenario that has played out today, rain has basically been the unwelcome spoiler, conspiring to ruin what could have otherwise been an extra-long long weekend.

2. Unexpected visitors. If you show up uninvited and unexpected banging on my door, don’t look horrified when you’re met by a large barking dog on my side of the storm door. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky that a barking dog is all you were met by. For purposes of argument, let’s just say when I answered an unexpected knock on the door in Memphis, I was always in the company of something that carried a lot more stopping power than a startled chocolate lab.

3. Lacking “it”. Define “it” any way you want: motivation, interest, focus, enthusiasm. Whatever “it” is, I have none. “It” is a tricky thing, you see. It isn’t linear and it can’t be gained nearly as rapidly as it’s lost. The goodwill and drive, built up over months and years can be lost in days and weeks. Compounded out over a long enough amount of time, and “it” is damned near impossible to ever get back… Which makes it any awfully good thing that I don’t keep all those eggs in once basket. It would be a real crying shame to be one of those people who found their motivation, there reason for being from just one thing. Suckers.

Sensational…

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As if anyone who’s paying even a modest amount of attention to the world doesn’t already know, the media are a sensational bunch. And I don’t mean that they’re really terrific and should be applauded for their hard hitting journalistic ethics.

CNNCase in point, I give you the banner headline from CNN.com, proclaiming “Historic, crippling, catastrophic ice” for Atlanta.

I don’t mean to minimize the grave trauma the American south is surely about to face, but it seems to me that description might be a bit of a stretch. Sherman burning Atlanta, that’s historic. An asteroid slamming into Stone Mountain, that’s probably catastrophic. And staying home for a day or two until it warms up enough to melt the mess, doesn’t quite equate to “crippling” at least in my lexicon. Wintry precipitation falling from the sky just doesn’t seem to rise to that level of noteworthiness – especially since it’s happening in the middle of the actual winter. If it were happening in August, well, there you’ve got some news for yourself.

So there you have it. Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Buy up ever loaf of bread and roll of toilet paper in the state. Fasten all seat belts. Seal all entrances and exits. Close all shops in the mall. Cancel the three ring circus. Secure all animals in the zoo… because what we’re most likely to see here is nothing more than a classic American shitshow and a corresponding media overreaction. At least that’s what we’ll see until the power goes out and we’re all plunged into the inky mid-winter’s darkness.

May God have mercy on our souls.

The snow day that wasn’t…

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I’m smart enough to understand that what I know about meteorology wouldn’t take the first day of class to teach at a halfway responsible university. Being a simple man, I try to leave the prognostication to the professionals and satisfy myself that whatever it’s doing when I take the dogs outside in the morning is a reasonably good indicator of what it’s going to be like for the next 8 hours or so. Being a complex system, of course, the weather doesn’t always cooperate with that assessment. That’s why keeping an umbrella and a dry pair of socks in the truck is always a good idea.

I rely on my simple approach to weather because I don’t have a multi-billion dollar array of radar stations, geosynchronous satellites, supercomputer powered models, and highly trained meteorologists pouring over data moment by moment. The good news is apparently you don’t need any of those things to make a go of it… because using that wide array of resources, you’re just as apt to get it as wrong as I am by simply sticking my head outside to see if it gets wet.

Still, if you can convince an entire metropolitan area that you know what you’re doing and make a damned good living while getting it sort of right and sort of wrong, well, then my hat is off to you. All I wanted was a damned snow day today. I’d have settled for a few hours early release. But no. That was a bridge too far, because here between Philly and Baltimore, it was the snow day that wasn’t. I think from now on I’ll just stick with the personal observation method and maybe pick up a barometer at the next flea market I visit. Then I’d say my predictions should be about on par with the professionals.