Tag Archives: winter

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.

What Jeff Likes this Week

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This week it’s a no brainer. What I like is the Winter Solstice. More specifically what I like is that from here on through mid-June the days are going to get longer. Even though Winter is just officially starting, the solstice comes with the promise that at some point in the fairly near future I’ll get to feel the sun on my skin on a weekday rather than just being able to looking at it through a tinted glass office window.

This might be a bit presumptive since this evening is technically the longest night of the year, but that’s just a bit of technicality. What’s more important is what comes after – the longer days, the warmer weather (eventually), the growing grass, and abundant critters. There’s still a long slog through the coldest months of the year, but the solstice reminds us that even in its depths, winter won’t last forever. The sun will rise, push back the darkness, and bathe the world in its glory again.

Hummm… I wonder if there isn’t a metaphor in there somewhere. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that so many of the religions founded in the northern hemisphere have some sort of traditional celebration this time of year.

Note: This is the 5th entry in a six-part series appearing on jeffreytharp.com by request.

Extra hour…

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Victory-Cigar-Congress-Passes-DSTWhile I’m sitting here at 9:30 with most of the items on my list knocked off for the day, I’m enjoying the “extra” hour today. Sure, now I know most people want to use that hour for rest, but lying in bed wide awake for an hour just isn’t my speed. That being the case, the solution was obvious – get up and start getting stuff done at 5:30 this morning. The baseboards are ready for the heating season, the air conditioner is ready to haul down to the basement, the living room and kitchen got cleaned – but not before there was a real ham and eggs breakfast, the leftover ham is now in salad form chilling in the fridge, and a leftover chicken bits from last night are simmering themselves into stock for eventual noodle soup. All days should be this productive.

Check back with me in about 7 hours when we’re approaching dusk and I’ll sing you another tune. That part of the “extra hour” makes me crazy – if for no other reason than needing headlights to get home from work for the next five months is so damned dispiriting. With the impending end of yard work and a lot more dark hours to fill, it’s a good time of year for writing. If there’s any real silver lining that’s got to be it. I guess it’s time to drag out the sweaters and wool socks and kick this whole hermit thing into high gear.

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.

Winter is coming…

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Sure, technically winter has been here for a while now, but every time snow threatens to come to the mid-Atlantic, it’s like the first time. That’s fun and exciting for about the first 30 seconds. After that it just becomes an enormous pain in the ass.

The predicted weather tomorrow shouldn’t be a factor here at the top of the bay until afternoon, which is both good and bad. It’s good in that I’m not going to stay up way too late tonight in the off chance that tomorrow is a delayed opening. It’s bad in that it’s the first time this season snow may fall while everyone is already at the office and chomping at the bit to get home.

I have what you could call an academic curiosity about what the powers that be at the office will do with mid-day snow. Since we’ve already shown that early morning snow is problematic for the decision-making process, I suppose my only hope is that they’ll be more caffeinated when the time comes to start figuring out what to do with 10,000 odd people all in a hurry to cram themselves through fewer exits than most people have fingers on one hand. Let’s just say that I’m not particularly full of faith. I think the best case scenario tomorrow will be bolting the moment someone says “liberal leave” in the hope of getting clear ahead of the first wave of an exodus.

Forecast for tomorrow: In extremam difficultatem.

Cold, colder, coldest…

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The media have made a great story out of the grave menace to our way of life posed by the Polar Vortex of Doom. Rightly so, I suppose. It is cold out there after all. But there’s gohomearcticyouredrunksomething that’s been nagging at me since the early hours of this morning. I mean aside from vaguely wondering if I shouldn’t have left a faucet running while I was at work.

It was cold last night – somewhere in the low teens when I took the dogs out for last call around 10PM. A little after 6 this morning, I took them out again and discovered that it was still cold. It was still cold to the tune of about 3 degrees. The wind felt like it was blowing at more or less the same speed from more or less the same direction. On both occasions, I was more than well aware that it was, by my own definition, cold as blue hell. However, I can’t say that 3 degrees at 6AM felt substantively colder than 13 degrees at 10PM. This all leads me to believe at some level cold is simply cold.

There’s probably some very scientific method of proving that people sense degrees of coldness in different ways, but based on my purely unscientific experience over the last 24 hours, I’d be hard pressed to confirm that. I’m willing to go ahead and make a concession that I would probably be able to tell -30 from 10, but in a narrower range, it all just feels like worse than average cold to me. Then again, I’m not a devotee of cold weather. At best I consider the cold something to be avoided, hidden from, and beaten back using all the home heating weapons at your disposal… but really, unless I’m going to be stuck in it for hours on end, I don’t need gradations of cold. Unless there’s a tragic accident, I’m not going to be in it long enough to do more than notice that “sweet baby Jesus it’s cold out here.” That makes discussions of cold, colder, and coldest pretty much academic by my standards.

Frozen…

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Having spent my formative years in Maryland’s snow belt, there’s not much in the way of winter precipitation that really bothers me. Of course it helps having a large 4×4 vehicle, too, but mostly it boils down to being confident in the knowledge, skills, and abilities earned while driving hither, skither, and yon through everything form a dusting to a couple of feet of the white stuff. I don’t go looking to drive around in it (like I did when I was young and more risk tolerant), but I don’t really shy away from it if there’s something I need to go out and do, either.

All of that logic goes out the window, however, when it comes to freezing rain. Even the mighty Tundra isn’t going to get traction when that starts building up on every flat surface. Freezing rain is that thing that shows up unseen until you stride onto the deck first thing in the morning ready to grab the world by the throat and then suddenly find yourself laying flat on your back wondering how they hell you got there. Sigh. If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the floor trying to get my back to unkink.