katallison

So around a half-hour ago, I realized I was out of cigarettes, and although it was raining pretty seriously, all you addicts in the crowd will understand that Out-Of-Cigarettes is a crisis that justifies going out into the friggin' Apocalypse. So I got my umbrella, headed out to the car, and as soon as I got in, the skies opened.

I would say that I've never SEEN such rain, except that I have, twice: once in Santa Cruz in '82 when the San Lorenzo came within a couple of inches of overflowing the dikes; and once in '87 when a supercell stalled over the Twin Cities and we got ten inches in an hour and everyone's basement flooded.

In any event, it was the sort of rain when having an umbrella really makes no difference whatsoever, because all air has been displaced by water. Driving, it was exactly like being in a carwash, lacking only the big rotating brush and the cloth strips going swush-swush. The five steps into the convenience store and back out to the car got me drenched all over; getting out of the car once home got me instantly soaked up to the knees, because the curbs were hubcap-deep in fast-running water. All traffic on the freeway was at a dead stop (I noted with some schadenfreude), on the city streets I could creep along no faster than 10 mph because I couldn't see, and two blocks from my house I crossed paths with some poor sod heading home on a bicycle.

The whole thing made me insanely gleeful, as do all incursions of wild irrational weather not involving Hellish Heat, and (having now changed my clothes and shoes) I'm still sitting here grinning, purely cheerful for the first time in weeks.

Radar picture as of a few minutes ago. Hoo boy, and also, yay storm!

(On reflection, it might not be a bad idea to shut the computer down for a while.)

While everyone else revels in HBP, I'm having a wholly unwarranted amount of fun this weekend browsing through the ts_ficathons stories. Unwarranted, because I was never even slightly a Sentinel fan; but there are excellent writers participating, many of whom have been away from TS for a while, and in reading their stories, I keep getting a feeling of -- well, a sort of uncomplicated happiness, a nostalgic reunion with beloved characters and situations, and I'm taking vicarious pleasure in their enjoyment (and in the excellence of many of the stories).

And even though this weekend is even more ridiculously hot than the week preceding, I've finally decided to just quit bitching and relax about it. I spent the bulk of the day at a very wonderful nearby library, which has (in addition to books and air conditioning) a coffeeshop right in the same building, with free WiFi and ample plug-ins, and I camped out there with my laptop and headphones and reading material and had a good time. Now I'm back home in my 88-degree house, wearing as little clothing as humanly possible, sipping a glass of cheap white wine with icecubes in it, flipping between the Cubs game and the hurricane special on Nat'l Geographic, and cultivating positive mental attitude. The Voice of Depression (and its thuggish buddy, the Hitman of Anxiety Disorder) are still skulking on the horizon, but I'm giving 'em the stink-eye and kicking 'em to the curb. TO THE CURB!

I look at the Nat'l Weather Service website, and the forecast highs for the next few days run 90 ... 92 ... 90 ... 90 ... 92 ...

It might get down into the mid-80s by Monday, but that far out it's a crapshoot. Hell, it could stay like this into August.

At work, the upheavals of the past months have settled into a steady simmer of uncertainty about our future, collectively and individually; the refrain is we don't know, we don't know, we just don't know. Some clarity might emerge by December, perhaps, or maybe not.

The current state of existence is like being becalmed in the Sargasso; heavy, motionless, suffocating, paralyzed. The feeling is something must change, but no change is foreseeable. And in the meantime, the rock has to be pushed up the mountain every day. One must rise at 4:30 to begin the chores of airing out the house (opening doors and windows, stationing fans), before sealing everything up at 7:30, or the place will be unbearable come evening. One must head into work, and carry out the chores of administrivia, and morale-boosting of one's staff, and meetings and memoranda. And then head home to the house that is, despite one's early morning efforts, sweltering and airless.

Next door, somebody is dribbling a basketball over and over, in the thick darkness. No sense of a game being played, baskets being shot, points scored. Just the thud thud thud, over and over, audible even over the roar of the fans pushing the heavy sullen air around.

And so to bed.

Beautiful, beautiful day, the kind of weather that causes one to remember why one puts up with Minnesota's multifarious meteorological miseries; cool, clear, fresh, brilliantly sunny, and everything in the full lush leaf and flower of high midsummer.

Which means I'm in the grip of my usual Beautiful Weather Affective Disorder, and am trying to focus instead on the list of concrete tasks to be accomplished this weekend. I've already cleaned out an amazing assortment of putrefying biomass from the refrigerator; once dishes are washed, I'll start on tonight's dinner. (Crockpot carnitas, not particularly authentic but dead simple; put a big chunk of pork loin or shoulder in the crockpot along with a quartered onion, quartered jalapeno, some chopped garlic, chopped cilantro, cumin, bay leaf, and enough chicken stock and/or beer to mostly cover. Cook 4-6 hours. (That's on high; on low, make it 8-10 hours.) Remove, drain/shred meat, serve with fresh corn tortillas, fresh salsa, avocado, refried beans, and beer aplenty. Yum.)

And because I am braindead, today's game, gacked from Metachat:

( What do you have on your computer desk? )

Lovely lovely evening, soft and fragrant. It's overcast--not the heavy overcast of impending rain, but a sort of high vaguely muted dappled-grey sky. The air is very still and mild, not warm, not chilly, and many birds are singing, and the trees are suffused with the tender fresh green of new leaves just unfurling. I adore grey days like this, vastly preferring them to brilliant sunshine/blue skies, and I reflect once again that I really should be living in the Pacific NW, and that my own personal hell would be, let's say, late afternoon in LA on a hot summer day, with the scorching blinding sun, and the stench of dust and traffic fumes, and being covered all over with sticky filthy sweat.

This week has been one of the worst of my recent memory, for job-related reasons that don't need explication at this juncture, and around midday on Thursday I lost my shit completely while talking with my best-buddy-at-work P., and had a minor meltdown in her office about all the stuff I haven't been dealing with adequately the past few weeks, and how behind I am on everything, and how asphyxiated with guilt I feel about about all of it. She heard me out, and then peaceably said something along the lines of "You know, you've really had a bad half-year, what with your boyfriend having the cancer surgery, and your father and stepmother dying, and now all this stuff at work." And somehow, hearing her say this -- I still feel bad about having gotten so behind on everything, and I still hate being That Person who Can't Cope And Has the Meltdown when life gets snarly, but I was able to take a step back and realize that actually there's a reason why my functioning has been a bit subpar lately, and after breathing deeply for a while I managed to regain some sort of equilibrium and focus. I'm still behind on everything and stressed, but am at least no longer in the asphyxiated with guilt space.

And eeeee! heres_luck tagged me with the music meme, and I shall attempt to comply (at some point, probably tomorrow), though great is my inadequacy and unworthiness. I should do it now, but I am going to watch Ed Wood and munch on pretzels and drink cheap champagne. Friday!!

E-mail sent out on the college-wide listserv, 3:40 this afternoon:

"Due to the snow, I have decided it is best to close the college early today. Go home! Drive carefully!

[signed, Bossman]"

Whatta sweetie. The snow is not actually all that horrific; 3-4 inches on the ground maybe, but falling thick and fast. We should have perhaps a half-foot by morning.

However, this is the first actual snow we've had all winter--it's been the least snowy winter of the past *century* in these parts. We had that weird splurt of freezing slushy rain around New Year's, which instantly laminated itself to the ground in a half-inch-thick sheet of white slippery linoleum, and then a few wan ineffectual thin flurries on top of that. But this is the first by-god snow of the season, and so of course everyone is freaking out, and driving like idiots.

And for all my cursing of it, I am once again helplessly reminded that the snow is the great compensation for living in this climate, because it is so exquisitely and utterly beautiful. It's very mild out, muffled, dimly luminous, and everything is white and grey and softly swirling.

I am home, eating a big bowl of whole-wheat pasta with pesto and sipping red wine. Work was absolutely crazed today, with project after crisis after dilemma piling up on my desk and in my voicemail, and I've brought home a stack of papers to work on this weekend, in between bouts of dealing with family crises. But the snow makes everything calmer (at least once one is off the roads), and the wine makes everything mellower, and assuming nothing immediate happens tonight with the family crises, I think I shall burrow in under a blanket and watch Millennium episodes. (My season 2 disks came last week! Yay!!)

I seem to be obsessed with babbling about weather tonight, for which I beg forgiveness, but my god, it's so odd outside. The ice continues to fall heavily from the sky and is piling up on all surfaces, big thick granular shoals of it like someone was running an enormous snow-cone machine over the city. But the air is very mild, and the sky is incredibly *light*. I've never quite figured why some winter nights are so luminous (in this case, it must be partly due to city lights refracting off of millions and millions of ice crystals in the air), but just now, as an experiment, I took a book out on my back deck (ice crunching underfoot) and was able to read fine print with perfect ease. It would be a wonderful night to go wandering around with a camera, except for the fact that I'd fall down and break a hip within three steps.

OMG it is not just WARM out it is freaking TROPICAL it is ALMOST 50 DEGREES! I was just standing out on my back deck WITH NO COAT ON and was PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE! On DECEMBER 30!!! I shall now proceed straight to the clothes-ripping-off and gambolling part of the agenda. ::rend, rend:: ::gambol, gambol::

(This utterly unnecessary post brought to you by global warming, getting off work early, and a nice big glass of chardonnay.)

Current conditions: -9 F, -27 F windchill. It's supposed to get up into the 30s next week, though, so no biggie.

The bus ride into work was nice this morning, with much easygoing camaradarie amongst the passengers, partly due to the weather ("Hey! Pretty cold, sure, but nothin' we can't handle!") and partly due to the "Hey! We're here, we're on the job, even though all those other wussies are takin' the day off!" factor. There was one particularly jolly guy in the front who looked like the love-child of Ernest Borgnine and Billy Bob Thornton, except he was missing most of his front teeth, and it was pleasant to sit and listen to the banter going back and forth, while watching the sun rise, all luridly pink-orange, over the frozen Mississippi.

And this is actually quite a pleasant day to be at work; almost nobody else is here, so I can get stuff done (and I have a lot of stuff to get done) in a low-key non-pressured way. Plus, I get all kinds of brownie points for actually *being* here, when everyone else is taking the day off. I've got some Dowland lute music playing on my computer, and chocolate to nibble, and very sweet cards from my co-workers on my bulletin board, and a space heater running to counteract the *freezing drafts* billowing in from the incredibly leaky windows. And I have a four-day weekend in prospect, when I can loll around reading all the new stories that will come on-line, and maybe get some writing going.

All of you who will be out and travelling in the snowier parts of the country, be careful! (Especially because our cold air seems to be headed your way. Sorry about that!)