Tag: weather

Weekly status update [0045/????]

I could say that snow interrupted my plans, but that would require me to have plans to begin with.

  • That said, yeah, it sure did snow quite a bit.  I ended up stuck at home from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday morning.  Fortunately the power never went out, and I had procured enough supplies that it wasn’t a problem (in fact, I’m still working through said supplies–by which I mean junk food, of course–and it looks like I’ll finish just in time for my trip home next week).
  • I got the oil changed in my car Tuesday (which was honestly the only reason I left home that day; otherwise I would have waited until Wednesday… except see below).  Now my vehicle is as ready as I can get it for the long jaunt home.  I may have gotten stuck in the snow in the service station parking lot, but I won’t tell if you don’t.
  • We also had an extended game night Tuesday night, which meant I had to get rolling anyhow.  We played Terraforming Mars.  It was a fine, if underwhelming, experience.  The game is an engine builder, which is one of my favorite types, but honestly it just felt like it had way more surface complexity (and subsequently took a long time to play) without necessarily providing a lot more in the way of actual enjoyment.  I think the time would be better spent on three games of Race for the Galaxy.
  • Speaking of board games, we also had an “online game night” on Thursday.  Sadly several people didn’t actually get their setup tested beforehand, so what should have been a group of six people ended up being a group of three due to technical issues.  We played Dominion and Century: Spice Road, both of which I like a lot.
  • I finished up The Labyrinth Index, which was very good, if very dark.  I’ve intentionally not started anything new since.  I plan on bringing my Kindle home for the holidays, and probably reading several of the Wheel of Time novels on it while I’m there.
  • I’ve continued to play Tametsi off and on as, really, the only videogame I’m currently into.  It’s been scratching both the game and the puzzle itch.
  • It dawned on me Wednesday that the sixth (and final) season of The Americans might be on Amazon Prime Video at this point.  Sure enough, it was.  I ended up watching all ten episodes back-to-back, something I hadn’t done in ages.  The last episode was one of the best hours of television I’ve ever seen, and the season reaffirmed just how good the show was; I’ll be writing a “Here’s a Thing” for it sometime soon.  But, uh, just watch it if you haven’t already.

Tomorrow’s the holiday party, which I’ve thankfully managed to wrangle a ride for; I wasn’t excited about having to drive to Asheville this weekend and then an additional 13+ hours come Wednesday for the trip back home.  I’m already feeling apprehensive about all of it, but that’s pretty typical for me.  I’ll manage.  Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up my posting schedule while I’m back in Louisiana, but I make no promises.  In any event: still not bored!

Weekly status update [0033/????]

What a week.

  • Saturday, Sunday, and Monday: the storm that didn’t really hit us.  I had thoughts.
  • Most of my weekend time–and, actually, most of my time during the week as well–was spent reading.  I think I read something like twelve novels in the last seven days; I know for a fact that I read three just yesterday.  It was nice.  I particularly want to note the three Seanan McGuire novellas that start with Every Heart a Doorway and the three Ben H. Winters novels that start with The Last Policeman.  They were all particularly pleasant reads.  I’m currently in the middle of Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, the first in another trilogy.  It had a bit of an impenetrable start, but I’m over halfway through it and enjoying it thoroughly now.
  • I also got back (at least temporarily) into watching television.  It’s Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the morning, then the just-released season of Bojack Horseman and season two of Jessica Jones in the afternoon.  Both of those are almost done, though; I’ll move onto Luke Cage for sure, and probably finally start the second season of Fargo as well.
  • Several of my old coworkers (and some that would be new, were I still working) were in town this week, and I was invited to a pair of group events.  Those were nice, but honestly the best evening was Tuesday, which involved just three of us having a long conversation about science fiction over dinner at the best local Tex-Mex place.  It’s always nice to catch up with folks, but I do much better in small groups than I do in large ones, and I’m delighted that someone reached out to plan that dinner.  (Thanks, Mike!)
  • The downside of said dinner: despite getting through a dozen novels this week, my library stack actually grew (in word count, if not volumes) thanks to suggestions-slash-recommendations from that extended conversation. Sigh.
  • Puzzles provided a nice series of interrupts over the course of the week.  Not just for me, too; I had Amazon ship a fat stack of puzzle books to one of my cousins back home, who had expressed interest in them back when I visited in April, and spent a couple of hours on the phone over the course of the week helping her work through some of them.  She seems pretty hooked, which gives me a good feeling.  Puzzles are awesome.
  • Nothing exciting on the video game front, though; I’m mostly taking a break after the heavy Creeper World action from the past few weeks, just maintaining my dailies in the handful of free-to-play games I still muck around with.  I really, really need to put Let It Die to bed.

I’ll finish up my Cardpocalypse series this coming week.  I know my tiny readership isn’t big on commenting, but: this is your final chance to get me to cover anything you think I’ve missed.  So, uh, get on that, I guess?

The warm equations

[Warning: This entry is darker than my usual fare.  It also makes heavier use of expletives.]

I fucking hate hurricanes.

That seems like a pointlessly true statement: who, exactly, likes them?  Jim Cantore, maybe (but probably not).  It keeps part of the NOAA in business.  Sociopath televangelists who “believe” that hurricanes are messages from God to repent our sins… much like the message that insists you call the 1-800 number emblazoned at the bottom of the screen to help fund their war against gays and the IRS.

It’s all well and good to wish (or pray, if that’s your thing) that a hurricane not make landfall at all, that it spin out over the ocean and mostly wish ill on pods of whales, but the moment they near the shore and start their unwieldy, unpredictable devestation, everyone’s plea becames: not me.

There’s the rub, though: isn’t everyone making that plea?  Everyone except Jim Cantore, of course, who has to go drive out into the middle of the damn thing, who is probably just going let’s get this over with so I can get dry for a goddamn change.

Hurricane Florence came aground this weekend; I spent a large portion of last week doing preparatory work for the event.  The fridge was filled, the shelf overflowed with Essential Hurricane Snax™, the spare bathtub used for the first time in several years in case I needed to bail water into the toilets so I could flush like a normal human being.  Stacks of books teetered on my couch, my Kindle Paperwhite charged back to full, crappy knockoff Yankee Candles squatted on the vanity in case the power went out and I had to take a leak in the middle of the night.

In the end, it was a non-event here in Lenoir.  Lots of wind–at times it felt like my house was about to take flight, a puddle-jumper take on The Wizard of Oz–and sporadic bursts of fine-drop rain that ended as abruptly as they started.  It’s easy to feel happy, even weirdly put-out: I did all that work for this?  Summer afternoon cloudbursts have been scarier than this shit.

But: New Bern.  A mother and child dead in Wilmington because of a tree that crushed their house.  In many places, the rivers continue to rise.  The flooding’s not over yet.

Not me, them.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m actually a competent human being, that I was actually as well-prepared for the situation as I could be.  I mean, it’s not that far-fetched; I’m from Louisiana.  I have memories of sitting wrapped up in a blanket on the covered porch of the house where I grew up, wet and getting wetter by the moment, while Hurricane Andrew dumped its trillions of gallons of water over southern Louisiana after it had decided that destroying most of south Florida was just not quite enough death and destruction.  This wasn’t my first major storm.

What if I could have, somehow, made the storm come this way?

What about everyone else in the area?  The people who weren’t as well-prepared, due to lack of diligence, lack of knowledge, lack of money?  How is that fair to them, just because I can handle it?

So: not me.  Let it be someone else, let the next town over have the long thin scar of the tornado, let the catastrophe be cozily distant, abstract and on the other side of an OLED display.  There is no such thing as a fair share of misery, so let mine be smaller, let my wishes be granted more often than those of the people sixty miles down the road, wishing just as fervently.  The equation is there; lives will be lost, homes destroyed, families shattered.  Just: not me.

I fucking hate hurricanes.

Weekly status update [0032/????]

I’m writing this one early, since it’s entirely possible that by the end of today I’ll be without power for a week or so.  That’s what I get for thinking that western North Carolina is all that different from Louisiana…

  • Speaking of which, a non-trivial amount of time this week was spent on preparations for Florence.  I bought a bunch of low-carb snacks, along with a lot of liquids (read: Coke Zero and, as an even bigger treat, Ginger Lime Diet Coke) to add thermal mass to my fridge, which is usually almost completely bare.  Charged spare phones and, vitally, my Kindle Paperwhite; checked out a metric ton of books from the library, washed every scrap of clothing I have, et cetera.  I’m as prepped as I’m likely to get.  Now it’s just a matter of lasting through the storm.
  • My reading binge continued, albeit at a bit of a slower pace.  Noir wasn’t as good as The Serpent of Venice (both by Christopher Moore); I actually really liked the latter, although I have no particular attachment to either The Merchant of Venice or Othello.  I thought it was quite a bit better than Fool, even.  Now I’m working on The Black Opera by Mary Gentle, which is good if dense… and glancing over at the 25 (!) other books I have checked out.  Woof.
  • I also played quite a bit on the computer.  Specifically, I finished off Creeper World 2 and its free Flash sequel CW2: Academy.  I really liked it, although the time pressures in a couple of the levels were very non-traditional for the series.  If you’re a fan of tower-defense-y RTS-y turtle-y indie-y games, the series will provide many hours of fun for not a lot of money.  It’s available on Steam.  Now to see if I can get Particle Fleet: Emergence working…
  • Still haven’t touched the code for Dudes.  Life got a little more hectic slash stressful than I like for jumping into something with that level of complexity.
  • I did find time to watch a couple more episodes of Jessica Jones, which seems to finally be picking up steam halfway through the season.  And the new episodes of BoJack Horseman dropped just this morning.  I watched the first one and see no reason to believe it won’t continue to be, for my money, the best show currently “on television” (whatever that means in the streaming era).
  • My order of puzzle books from Turkey finally came in after spending over a week in Customs.  I’m super-stoked about them; there seem to be lots of neat, interesting puzzles inside, even if some of them (like the traditional logic problems) will be forever cut off to me since I don’t read Turkish.  It’s every issue of the magazine ever published, and they only cost me $2 apiece even with shipping halfway around the planet, which goes to show just how big a price disparity there is on these sorts of things.

Right now I’m sitting in my comfy recliner, watching the wind steadily pick up in speed outside while I prepare to curl up with a book for a while.  I’ll post again here later this weekend, assuming I can.  See you on the other side!