Tag Archives: weather

What Annoys Jeff This Week?

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If I were to list the things that really got my goat this week, there’s a pretty good chance that I’d still be typing when it was time to start on next week’s edition. So without any further introduction let’s get right into it…

1. Cold. Or more specifically cold in the office. Or even more specifically, cold air being blown out of the air handler directly over my head and rolling down the back of my neck. Even protected as they are, ever muscle from the back of my head to my lower back feels like someone spent the last two days twisting them into knots. Thank God it was only on the 40s and 50s outside. If I walk in some morning in January and find the cold air venting, just go ahead and put me out on annual leave, because I’ll be going back to the house. When I lived in Memphis, I use to think I’d enjoy fall and winter in a more northerly clime. Clearly I was wrong. What I really want is Baltimore with Miami’s weather.

2. Warped time. It’s Thursday. I know this because both Outlook and my iPhone tell me. It has still felt like Tuesday all blessed day long. And since the only thing more annoying than feeling like Tuesday is feeling like Monday, it comes in above the cut line this week.

3. News exhaustion. I don’t say it very often, but I think I’m overloaded on the news. From Sandy to the election to random feeds that show up in my Twitter stream… At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to shut it all down for a few days. I just hope I can manage to stay focused through next Tuesday… ‘cause this one’s gonna be good.

The dawn’s early light…

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It’s just after 7:30 AM and there’s just enough light now to start seeing the world beyond the four apparently study walls of Rental Casa de Jeff. I’m happy to say that a quick check of the perimeter, accompanied by two less than enthusiastic dogs, shows no real damage to the structure. The only thing that is out of place is a lilac bush that seems to be leaning an at unnatural angle against the fence. I have no intention of really looking at that until this damnable cold rain lets off. With the sound of the wind last night, I was expecting much, much worse in the dawn’s early light. Once again my general pessimism about the way of things has paid off by letting me be pleasantly surprised this morning. Even so, I have to confess that I’d rather experience storms from video wall on the 2nd floor of FEMA’s office downtown than listening to it happen around me in real time.

For now, the coffee is on, I’ve got a propane wall heater taking the chill off the 61 degree kitchen, and everything is watertight. With the number of friends who have taken on water or had other damage, I realize how fortunate I’ve been. Once I’ve got some caffein back in my system, I’ll get the computer equipment back out of it’s watertight storage and start getting everything back online.

For my readers, friends, and family, I hope all is well. Stay warm, stay safe, and I’ll see you when all this finally blows over.

Plans unplanned…

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I took today off because I was supposed to have Winston’s 6 week follow-up visit with the vet as well as my own annual eye exam later in the day. We all know I like it when days off are productive days. Sure, this is a theoretical “once in a lifetime storm event,” but I can’t be the only one sitting around annoyed that nature is dinking around with things I need to get done. I’ll do my best to remind myself that this is officially now a “free” day off and I’ll be able to rescheduled my leave to another day… so if nothing else, it’s a two-fer in terms of getting out of the office. That perspective makes using one of them to do nothing other than sit around the house today much more tolerable. Happy hurricane-ing.

Older, fatter, and balder…

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In the face of “impending weather catastrophes” it seems that everyone becomes an older, fatter, and balder version of their 12 year old self… with the most prominent questions of the day focused on pondering the mysteries of how and when a decision might be made to close the office and whether it’s best to pick up a cubic yard of toilet paper after work or wait to the early hours of the morning to make a market run. Since I’m already taking the day off Monday, the question is pretty much academic… unless the whole system slows down and doesn’t start rolling in until late in the day Monday or very early Tuesday morning. What I’m really looking for here is a healthy dose of mayhem and chaos, by which I mean enough to extend the weekend, but not enough to cause a disruption in the power supply… because let’s face it, a day with no electricity isn’t really any better than a day at work.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Stop complaining about the heat. It’s summer in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s hot. If you don’t like hot weather, consider moving to Maine or volunteering for an expedition to the South Pole. Here in this part of the country, the weather can be pretty much relied on to be somewhere between warm and scorching in June, July, and August. Those months come around at more or less the same time every year which means temperatures in the 90s shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.

2. Unrealistic expectations. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t bend the knee at every opportunity. By nature, I’m an inquisitive person and when someone says something stupid I’m as apt to ask for their logic as I am to just accept it and move on. Occasionally you run into the kind of person who’s not use to being questioned or needing to explain himself. They tend to be the the most fun to play with because they turn a delightful shade of red when they realize you’re not going to hop to and dance to the tune they’ve called. It never fails to amaze me how much trouble everyone could avoid by having reasonable expectations to begin with rather than relying on bluster and the beliefe that everyone will do what they say “just because”.

3. Pretty much everything else. There’s a good chance I need to go to bed and get a good nights sleep, because it would be easier this week to write about what hasn’t annoyed me on some level. That, of course is much less interesting for all of us. Some might say I’ve even “in a mood,” though if we’re honest I’m mostly in a mood because people make me want to bludgeon myself around the head and neck with a blunt object. If tomorrow weren’t Friday and the weekend didn’t promise sweet, sweet quiet time, I’d probably be on the lookout for a nice bell tower or possibly a school book depository. Not really. That would require way more interaction that I’m really feeling up to.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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By popular demand, I’m pleased to post the 15th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. I promise, unless I’m cut down by another bout of the sickness, that I’ll do my best to keep up with it as a regular feature.

1. Primary Elections. The field of potential candidates starts out vast, but by the time a state with a real population gets around to voting the field has already shrunk to just a handful. By the time the great State of Maryland gets around to holding its primaries on April 3rd, it’s a pretty good bet that the field will have already narrowed down to one. Letting the party unite behind a single candidate early is great… for the candidate and for the party. It’s pretty crummy for the voters, though. If we can all agree that our national general election day is always going to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, surely we can come up with a similarly convoluted methodology for holding primary elections all on the same day. So, you know, my vote here in Maryland is worth as much as the ones cast in New Hampshire or South Carolina. I’ll hold my breath waiting on that good idea to take hold.

2. Sub-freezing Weather. Sure, I know everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. This is a blog after all, so it’s only real mission in life is to serve as a voice box for all the bitching and complaining I can come up with… Which is why I’m going to announce my official opposition to temperatures anywhere below 32 degrees. The only purpose of being that cold is to enable snow production and if there’s not going to be snow (and the accompanying day off from work), then it has no business being below freezing. There. I said it.

3. Ground Coffee. I’d be willing to say that my daily intake of coffee is probably higher than the average person, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. All I really want is just to be able to buy a pound of ground coffee. I don’t want a 12 ounce package, or God forbid, the 10.5 ounce size that I almost picked up. One pound of coffee gets me exactly through one week. It’s the perfect proportion of requirement to availability. 10.5 ounces, on the other hand, gets me to about Wednesday… for the same price I was paying for a full pound back in the “good old days”… You know, four or five years ago. I’m sure someone ran a focus group and said people would rather get a smaller size for the same cost than get the same size for a greater cost, but what that didn’t take into account was the people in that focus group were apparently morons. Seriously. Just give me a pound of coffee and if you have to charge me $12 instead of $8, I’ll live with that. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that decreased supply means increased price and with the notion that inflation drives up the price of everything over time. Trying to pull a slick one with packaging, though, just makes you look like a bunch of tools.

Missing it…

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I really have two minds when I watch the news covering the snow that fell on Memphis this morning and the on my old stomping grounds in Western Maryland tonight. Part of me that would be perfectly happy sitting on a beach watching the palm trees sway 24/7/365 is appalled that it’s only a matter of time before real winter finds me here on the cusp of the Eastern Shore. The other part of me that’s still 15 years old gets immediately giddy at even the mention of an impending snow storm. That would also be the part of me that insists on staying up too late on nights when snow is forecast to start late out of misplaced confidence that I’ll have the next day off.

For the last five years the closest thing I did to preparation for winter weather was grope under the driver’s seat until I found my ice scraper. It occurs to me that this might me an appropriate time to pick up an actual snow shovel or something. At some point sooner rather than later, the moderating influence of the Bay isn’t going to be enough to keep old man winter off the doorstep. For now, though, I think I’ll just be happy with the rain.

Select “Panic” in 5…4…3…2…

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So you guys may have seen that the media are making a big stink about the impending hurricane of doom that will be sure to devastate the East Coast over the weekend. Judging from the current models and from watching these things semi-professionally for the better part of the last ten years, I’m more inclined to think that eastern Maryland will end up getting a little soggy on Sunday and maybe have a few branches blown around if things “get bad.” That said, there’s always the off chance that this thing doglegs left and shoves a wall of water directly up the Chesapeake. That would fall directly in the category of Situation Other than Good. With the track edging east with every model run, that unhappy outcome seems less and less likely.

What seems more likely at this point is that the regional weather personalities and newscasters are going to whip the local indigenous population into frenzy by close of business Friday regardless of what the reality looks like. What this means is that every idiot with a pickup truck, a car, or a moped is going to come out of the woodwork and descend on Walmart, Costco, and every grocery store within driving distance and buy six gallons of milk, two dozen eggs, five loaves of Wonder bread, and a metric ton of toilet paper. I ordinarily don’t begrudge anyone their pre-apocalyptic stockpile, except in this case their panic is going to conflict with my normal grocery shopping schedule.

In the event that this was an actual emergency, I’d be the first to institute the no harm, no foul rule, but in the case of purely fictitious disaster, I’m less inclined to give stupid people the benefit of the doubt. My inclination at the moment is to go ahead and make due this weekend by drawing down my own fairly impressive stockpile. Sadly, like Christmas shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, I just don’t know if I can stay away from the spectacle of so many asshats gathered in so few places. I know I shouldn’t, but I might not be able to keep myself from going to watch the spectacle first hand.

Now I’m scared…

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Tornado warnings don’t really bother me. A county-wide state of emergency ain’t no thing. The waters can fall from the skys and winds tear at the roof. Power can even fail – as long as it’s not too long – and I’m not moved much. But this afternoon, I was stopped cold and realized the desperateness of the situation. Old Man River is on the march – perhaps to challenge the high water mark set in the 30s. A once in a century flood tide along the length of America’s great inland waterway. The father of waters is rolling on to the Gulf… and for the first time in their history, the casinos are closing. Casinos. Are. Closing.

Now casinos exist for one and only one reason – to make money hand over fist. In good weather and bad, they’re as constant as the $20 bills feeding their slots. And now, one by one they are closing, laying on sandbags, and hoping to ride out the high water. If casinos are scared enough to stop making money, surely what hope is there for mere mortals? Then again, I live 15 miles from the river on high ground, but that seems less dramatic.

It’s a simple matter of motivation…

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Now that we’re starting into the time of year when the outdoor temperature isn’t approaching that of the surface of the sun, there are at least half a dozen major or semi-major projects I’ve convinced myself I would start once the weather broke. Wanna know how many of those I started on this rainy morning? None. Zero. Nada. I feel like I’m lucky to run the vacuum and keep the grass cut… and fertilized… and trimmed. Ok, so I’m probably a little more obsessive about the grass than anything else around here. The truth is, I just don’t have any motivation to do those things at the moment.

I don’t want to go find paint chips. I don’t want to start a materiel list for getting a floor down in the upstairs bedroom. I haven’t called a single contractor to get an estimate on having the patio covered. Logically I know I have about 5 hours between when I get home and the time my eyelids start getting to heavy to focus on much of anything and I feel this overwhelming compulsion to fill those hours with something productive but not the motivation to actually get much of anything started.

I think maybe the problem is that I’m not a fan of multi-stage projects. I like things that I can start and finish in a one or two day blitz… and none of the things I want to do is one of those kinds of projects. Of course all of this may be irrelevant if someone keeps dragging me around Shelby Farms on Saturday mornings, because I’ll never be able to walk up the stairs anyway.