SL 651

~ Laura

I’m calming down from doing a radio interview this morning. It went fine. After I stopped studdering.

So, what are we reading?

Tuft’s deal with adjuncts sounds great.

Mixed reviews for last night’s SNL renuion. I kinda liked it.

David Carr was great.

I want to try this chickpea stew.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000003506241&playerType=embed

Published by Laura

36 thoughts on “SL 651”

  1. I’m not reading anything. We are basically frozen in place here. For the first time ever, my mom offered to have the kids visit her during February break. So excited. Then the snows came. And came. And came. And are still coming. We literally cannot find a time to bring the kids down to NY when it’s not snowing. Then my mom suggested the New London ferry. We would drop them off in New London, and she would pick them up in Orient. We can’t even make that work. It’s insane. Cranberry probably has it worse than me because she’s closer to Boston (or so I’ve always thought). We dug a path in the backyard so our dog can pee; it’s now taller than she is, and she’s a 25-30 pound dog.

    Yes, I am losing it this morning. It’s also 3 degrees with a wind chill of -16.

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    1. Oh, yes, we have it worse. The path to the front door will be taller than our middle schooler soon, if it keeps snowing, due to snow from the walk, and snow cleared from the roof (ice dams.) Our mailbox is embedded in snow. After each storm, we shovel it out so the mailman can deliver the mail. It now pokes out of a wall of snow. We may have to shovel around the entire house, to prevent snow melt from flowing through our windows. We have to clear the exhaust for the heating system regularly.

      A little snow forecast for tomorrow, and possibly another storm on Saturday. No word from the forecasters as to when the weather pattern will change. I dread the thaw, though. If it thaws and freezes, chaos will result.

      Public schools are not allowed to extend the school year beyond the end of June. It could well keep snowing. It is not safe to drive during a blizzard; there was a 20 car pileup on 128 yesterday. The most rational thing to do would be for the legislature to suspend that requirement for this year. Just declare this month a dead loss, and tack it on at the end of the year. Even canceling April vacation won’t work, if it keeps on snowing. Unfortunately, many parents will leave for vacation, rather than send their kids to school. They won’t show up on weekend makeup days, either.

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  2. Yeah. It’s pretty horrible. We were going to try out a new BBQ place in NYC today, but we don’t want to walk from the car to the restaurant.

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      1. I’ve been writing for an online audience for over ten years now. This is the first time that I was worried about somebody showing up at my doorstep with a baseball bat.

        The topic of conversation this weekend is whether the issue brought out the crazy people or whether online conversations have become more crazy. I can see how people would disagree with me, but the anger was over the top. One guy wrote me a 2,000 word letter that accused me of secretly taking money from the Gate Foundation. People went out of their way to find me on various social media, track down my town, post it on the Atlantic, and then tell me that I was a fascist.

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      3. That IS crazy.

        Unlike MH, I think I could get angry enough to write 2,000 words but it certainly wouldn’t be about someone’s opinion online.

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      5. I hope you know that’s not okay. It’s just not. Dissent, even nasty comments and long emails, fine. But tracking down your home is beyond the pale.

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      6. “Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry enough to write 2,000 words.”

        I saw a quote once that was (roughly), only crazy people write letters longer than four pages. (Handwritten, presumably.)

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    1. It’s actually better in the City: 9 degrees and the streets are clear. (NYC has dodged most of the snowfall.) Sunday we walked to church, and Sunday night my valentine and I went out to dinner, though we cabbed both ways for the dinner part. My cousins in Minnesota and Maine are the ones who have it tough.

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      1. It can be tough in Maine, but they are a little more used to it. I lived there during Winter 2000-2001, and we had more snow than Boston currently has. But it didn’t feel quite as horrible. It was more the constant snowing and gray skies–in March–that got to me.

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      2. Minnesota’s fine. Not much snow. Ok, bitterly cold. Running both the woodstove and the furnace. But driving — I drove 5 hours through Pennsylvania Saturday night back to my son’s college after a wrestling meet. Should have been 2-3 hours at most, but winds made it some of the worst snowy driving I’ve ever done.

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  4. Will it be mean for me to post that we are having unseasonably warm weather. Yesterday, it was sunny (yes, actually sunny and no rain) with a high of 60, and we’re expecting the same today. I saw the sun lift over the mountains yesterday (and today). This may not seem unusual to the rest of you, but it’s been 10+ days since we saw the sun. So there is that.

    Here, everyone is mourning the lack of snow in the mountains (ski season was pretty much cancelled) and is fleeing to inland mountains to ski during February break.

    (I do feel for you guys, having experience the housebound snow myself before heading out here)

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    1. Yes, I was just telling a friend in Portland about the blizzards we’ve been having, and she mentioned the lack of snow. She is a big XC skier/snowshoer, so she is very depressed.

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      1. Lack of snow here on the local mountains above Vancouver and also at Whistler. Cherry blossoms and crocuses are out.

        It’s been a huge bust for the ski hills. No snowshoeing even.

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  5. I am reading Island Bush Pilot on paper by Roy Franklin, who developed a island hopper air service in the San Juan Islands during the post-war years, from scratch (including rebuilding planes and building runways and an airport). It’s a remarkable story of understated resilience and perseverance. It reminds me of Boys on the Boat, except in Boys on the Boat, the resilience and perseverance, in a story being told by others, isn’t understated. Roy Franklin flies missions through literal fire (when he flew supply missions for fire crews in the mountains) survives, and says “cool”. He flies with cake boxes stuck between his controllers and his belly (’cause a mother asked him to deliver a cake to her firejumper son, on his birthday). I admire this strain of people, who are willing to work physically hard and take enormous personal risk, and I fear that we undervalue them in our current society.

    I’m also reading old books, on my iPad, after discovering that much of LM Montogomery’s older books are in the public domain. I also discovered Open Library, which allows you to borrow eBooks from some kind of library consortium. There I discovered many of the Janet Dailey Americana series (for Harlequin), which I read as a youngster. They are easy reading, but its fun to revisit, and I really appreciate collections (in her case, writing a romance novel set in each of the 50 states). When I read them as an adolescent, I didn’t know there was a book for each state (I don’t think there was, yet), but I did appreciate that there was a theme. So far I’ve read a romance set in Hawaii and one set in Vermont.

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    1. I used to own all the Americana books, which I too read as a teenager. I have many favorites in that series, but a special soft spot for The Matchmakers/That Carolina Summer. (TCS is a sequel, with the kids as young adults.)

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  7. I recommend Lily King’s Euphoria, about three anthropologists in the 1920s. Interesting, serious, informative, but entertaining. I do not recommend The Casual Vacancy, which is sometimes brilliant in its depiction of small-town life but is incredibly depressing. (I’m not sure I’ve ever been angry with an author for being mean to her characters before.)

    Sorry to hear people are being mean about the article. It’s a shame people can’t talk about important things on the internet without going crazy. Hope the interview went well. (BTW, it’s “stuttering.”)

    Here in the midwest we are having a normal February – sometimes sunny, sometimes dreary, usually between 0 and 32.

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  8. Mean comments, I can handle. No big deal. Red-faced anger and 2,000 word e-mails make me nervous. I’ll get over it, and write something else in a couple of weeks. I’m not entirely sure why. I made $200 from that article.

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    2. What’s that old saying, “men are scared that women will humiliate them while women are scared that men will kill them”. It’s dangerous being an “uppity” smart woman.

      And that’s only partly tongue in cheek.

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  9. I am the odd one out, I am happy it is snowing. We haven’t had much snow here this winter in southwest Ohio and I need a good blanket that will last for a few days to for the DIY radon test I bought a couple months ago to give an accurate reading. I want to see if all the basement work we had done lowered our borderline status at all (lots of cracks got filled). Else it’s more $$ for installing a mitigation device.

    I’m going to go back to being the occasional lurker but first I want to thank you Laura for the previous thread. I learned a few things, was reminded of a few things, was presented with a few things to consider, and most of all, had the chance to hone some of my thinking. I also got a little kick out of knowing I might have helped open one person’s mind just a little (when bj went to take the practice test). I was forced to weigh, once again, if I want to try to master Twitter and go on Facebook, but found I am still not there yet. So all in all, a good experience for me. I’m sorry some of it was threatening to you.

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    1. Oh no. I didn’t feel threatened by the conversation here. The weirdos were coming from other places. I shut down the comment section because I was fried and I felt like I was repeating myself. This is a largely volunteer effort here, so I do what works for me.

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  10. I’m reading travel books and websites, because it’s the only way to stay sane. I’m currently planning a three week trip that starts in Istanbul and ends in Rome. Will I ever actually go? Who knows. But I feel a lot better now that I have the first week plotted out.

    I’m with Cranberry – my mailbox is peeking out of a bank of snow. The snow on my deck just reached the railing, which is about four feet up. The snowbanks on either side of my driveway make it impossible to see if any cars are coming on my (busy) street. But the snow itself isn’t as daunting as the cold.

    My SO is heading to Richmond tomorrow and it doesn’t look like that will be a whole lot more pleasant.

    I’m scared to count down the days until Florida, because who knows, I may end up freezing rain in Tampa in March.

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  11. my kids are gleefully counting their snow day chickens. Goddamnit, I say, County is spending hundred bucks a day for you to be in school, you lose all that learning! Water off a duck’s back, it is.

    I may get a snow day: the paper says three domes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/02/16/schoolcast-and-fedcast-for-tuesday-february-17-in-d-c-area/?tid=pm_pop

    But, everything had melted from before, so if we get ten inches, it’s ten inches total. We’re in zone 7, so most years the camellias and the figs come through fine. Then we get a year like this one, and they either die or are killed to the ground. We’ll see what we still have come spring.

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    1. We’re kind of marginal for palm trees, but some people still try to grow them. Several years ago we had a blizzard (by local standards) and pretty much every palm tree in town died.

      After a few days with highs in the 70s, we had all mid-30s and rain today and it looks like it’s going to be freezing tomorrow morning.

      The kids would love some snow, but it’s probably not to be.

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  13. I’m reviewing a YA rural fantasy – “Prairie Fire”, which was purely awesome. It’s the sequel to “The Song of Owen” over which I squeed last year on its release. I’m also writing more conventional reviews of two books for an academic journal. Eep! All due soon!

    Thank goodness it’s our reading week. Term’s half-over here in the north.

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