~Saturday~ This morning the much touted, and profusely reported, blanket of white was on the ground. Now, in 2015, all of the major weather forecasters will be bragging about how they “nailed the one of 2010.”
I didn’t mention in yesterday’s entry that I parked my car out of my townhouse area, down on Kaplan Drive, as I live on quite a steep hill. It’s steep enough that you really have to push the passenger side door to open it against the g-force, and if you don’t hold it open while you get out, it will close on you. Fortunately for me, as the driver, I get in and out on the downhill side.
As expected, today my hill turned into a laboratory to experiment on every possible thing that students think might slide on snow and ice. They included:
- The ever-popular trash can lids—including steel ones; plastic ones; and some large enough to support only a child, but with adult girth hangeth over them anyway.
- Various and sundry shapes and sources of cardboard, the most popular being broken down boxes.
- Sitting on hard-plastic surfaced folding tables, sitting in them surface side down and with the legs folded although it would not have surprised me at all if it had evolved into four people sharing one, standing with the legs unfolded as each held onto one.
- Inflatable swimming pool rafts.
- Inflatable swimming pool inner tubes.
- Rubber inner tubes.
- A gasoline powered Go-Kart, which wasn’t to slide on per se, but to drive atop the snow and ice as if it were a snowmobile.
Later in the day, I was absolutely astonished to watch a guy come out on his bicycle and ride it down the hill. I craned my neck enough in the window to see just exactly how he was going to stop at the bottom of the hill.
At some point in the day, I tweeted:
| @nematome Not to sound like an old geezer, but I am shaking my head at some of the things I’ve seen fools sliding around on today. #snOMG #amateurs |
I took advantage of being snowed in to complete a couple of items on my to-do list, the first being my presentation for Dr. Cat Warren’s class Editorial and Opinion Writing class from 3:00-4:15 on Monday. I’m going to cover three main topics: Creating a Simple Blog, Blogging Tools, and Blogging Best Practices. Creating the presentation was a good exercise in that it made me think about the whys and hows of my blogging.
That reflection made me think about the reading we reflected on at last weekend’s Alternative Spring Break Retreat that differentiated the terms fix, help, and serve. Before that reading, I would have thought about presenting in Cat’s class as “helping her out.” But after doing it, and realizing that I’ve gotten something out of as well, I’m really doing this presentation in service.
After that, I worked on homework for my own class, which I have Monday evening from 6:00-7:15. I started on the creation of my second blog entry about the KeePass Password Safe password manager product thinking about what I wanted the posting to consist of, which ended up including a video of the installation process.
To that end, I spent some time downloading and learning how to use a screen capturing tool called Jing, which I learned about last semester from my friend and colleague Jen, who used it for her usability class and while video-capturing my screen movement as I tested a product for her.
I really wanted to get to the gym today, since I didn’t go yesterday, but by the time I was ready to go, I called first and they were closed. At that point, I walked down to my car to remove all the snow and ice from it for later use. Although it was nowhere near this bad, walking toward it, I thought of this 42-second commercial:
Perhaps unwisely, I met Joe out at Flex at 10:00.
The most dangerous part of the venture was getting into my car on Kaplan. As I did so, some college kid in daddy’s 5-series BMW—with at least one girl in it, which I know due to the high pitch scream of terror that followed—came flying up the street and turned the wheel sharply while slamming on the breaks.
The car came to a spinning halt about a foot away from me as I stood beside my car. That definitely put me into old geezerhood mode, shaking my head in disbelief.
There were 6 people in Flex, seven counting the bartender. Joe and I played a game of pool and eventually abandoned the place for The Borough. On a brisk walk there, we ran into Phil Mundt, who had just returned from there, and we twisted his arm (approximately one millimeter) to turn around and go back with us.
It was quite festive there, and we had a couple of drinks and all split an order of cheese fries with both some ranch dressing and some Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce, which was, well, sweet. Hence the name.
I was grateful to have an uneventful ride home, albeit late, at around 1:30.