Snow!
As forecasted we did indeed get a bundle of it -- two and a half feet to be more precise. Most of it is still here, doing nothing but inconveniencing everybody. It's blocking parking spots, taking up entire lanes of highway, making sections of the sidewalks unwalkable, and making people's feet wet and their eyes sore. It's now that nasty yellowish-brown, sludgy snow, not the pure white snow that you here about in Christmas songs.
Snow is like your roommate's hard-partying friend in college. You know that guy. He's a nice enough fellow, but a bit too much of a fuckup for you. He doesn't actually go to school because he can't handle the responsibility and because he has two DUIs and a misdemeanor for fleeing arrest on his record (and the misdemeanor will go up to a felony if he doesn't stay out of trouble for two years). Every now and then he comes to visit your roommate and you guys all have a party and drink and laugh and have a good time. But by Monday, when, on your way to class, you are stepping over his prostrate carcass, passed out on your kitchen floor, fully clothed, with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth, you just want him to go away ASAP. That's how snow is.
Actually, rereading that, that's not a great analogy. How about this: Snow a is likely a beautiful woman who has emotional issues, and ... Oh, screw it. Snow is like snow. It is very cool while it's falling majestically from the sky and blanking out your city like an eraser on a whiteboard. But it leaves you with an awful mess and a huge headache in its aftermath. At this point, it can't melt fast enough for me.
But Lil' S1 certainly enjoyed it while it was still fresh. School was canceled Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so we had five days with him home, which was trying, but the fact that we could put him in his boots and his snowsuit and take him outside for a few hours everyday made things much more bearable than they would have been otherwise. Also, he could play with his little friend down the street, which was nice.
One thing I don't like about the snow is that it exposes my inadequacies as a preparer. I would be a terrible boy scout. I never have the appropriate gear for a situation. On Sunday we walked to our friends' house and our friend C is on his roof shoveling snow from it. His walkways are already completely clear, and he's decked out in Gor-tex with ski bib pants and buff snow boots and all that. Meanwhile, I'm wearing hand-me-down boots that my dad gave me, like, ten years ago (and that give me awful blisters), sweats over jeans, and a normal rain jacket. Also, I don't even own a snow shovel. I had to borrow his. And then I accidentally broke it (still works though), so I had to tell him I will buy him a new one. And then a small avalanche of snow slid off our roof, so I had to re-shovel the walk, so I had to ask a different friend to borrow his shovel, because of course I'm not going to ask somebody whose shovel I just broke to use it again.
But now everything is done. We have a nice clear path from the sidewalk to our front door, and our car is completely dug out -- one of them anyway. After shoveling for a few hours, I sized up the amount of effort it was going to take to dig out our other car, and thought, "nah... we can get by with one car until this stuff melts." So the only thing I have left to do snow related is buy a couple of shovels -- one for my friend, one for me for the next time it snows. Although, what I really should do is think about the things we're going to need in the summer and buy them now, while they are cheap and in stock. Now that would be smart... I probably won't do that.
OK, a few quick hitters before I go.
-Election year. After being very supportive of Bernie Sanders in the beginning, I'm now leaning begrudgingly toward Hillary. A lot of the recent criticism against Sanders is ringing true to me. It's not the electability factor (in our sharply divided, two-party system winning the primary of a major party automatically makes you electable, in my opinion). It's that the finances of his proposals -- particularly with respect to health care -- don't add up. And this is assuming he could pass them through Congress, which he obviously couldn't.
Also, it doesn't help woo voters like me, when Sanders and his supporters dismiss all criticism against him (even from people who big-picture agree with him) as "hatchet jobs" drummed up by establishment sell-outs and corporate hacks.* This is the same noxious deflection that many anti-vaxxers use to defend their ridiculous positions. Anybody who disagrees with them is ipso facto a slave to Big Pharma.
-Another thing I don't like about Sanders is that he talks about moneyed influence in much the same way Conservatives talk about big government. That is, it's a bad thing, in and of itself, without further explanation. But I think that's the wrong way to look at things. Just as big government isn't necessarily bad, neither is the influence of money in politics. Wasteful, inefficient big government is bad; the corruptive influence of money in politics is bad. But neither of things is a certainty in all cases.
For example, on a recent episode of the podcast The Weeds the hosts make the point that moneyed interests are often times more practical and empirically-based than the general public and its elected leaders and that can lead to actual compromises and results that we wouldn't achieve otherwise. Obamacare is an example of this -- the insurance industry was obviously a major reason why it passed -- and if you don't like Obamacare, then there is also the debt ceiling debacle. Absent the influence of Wall Street, Republicans might have actually been stubborn enough to take us over the cliff. Money is not ideological in the way humans are; its only goal is to make more money. This can (and often is) a very bad thing, but it can be a good thing too. (Big business often opposes discriminatory laws as well.) It just depends on how we regulate it and keep it in check.
-I tweaked my shoulder somehow and shoveling aggravated it. It's not enough that I'm going to go the doctor or anything like that, but it's definitely enough to annoy me. That's one of the underrated bad parts about getting older: You're never completely injury-free.
-S's mom left us today. S's dad has to get shoulder surgery (speaking of shoulder injuries) on Tuesday, so she has to go back to South Carolina to help him out. She's coming back in a month and will likely stay until the summer, but this month is going to be challenging. I've gotten used to sleeping uninterrupted until 7:30 every morning. There goes that luxury.
-Somebody on Facebook just posted that it's supposed to snow another couple of inches this weekend. Dear god, I hope they're wrong.
Well, that's about it. Before we go though, how about another dose of Snow?!
Until next time...
As forecasted we did indeed get a bundle of it -- two and a half feet to be more precise. Most of it is still here, doing nothing but inconveniencing everybody. It's blocking parking spots, taking up entire lanes of highway, making sections of the sidewalks unwalkable, and making people's feet wet and their eyes sore. It's now that nasty yellowish-brown, sludgy snow, not the pure white snow that you here about in Christmas songs.
Snow is like your roommate's hard-partying friend in college. You know that guy. He's a nice enough fellow, but a bit too much of a fuckup for you. He doesn't actually go to school because he can't handle the responsibility and because he has two DUIs and a misdemeanor for fleeing arrest on his record (and the misdemeanor will go up to a felony if he doesn't stay out of trouble for two years). Every now and then he comes to visit your roommate and you guys all have a party and drink and laugh and have a good time. But by Monday, when, on your way to class, you are stepping over his prostrate carcass, passed out on your kitchen floor, fully clothed, with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth, you just want him to go away ASAP. That's how snow is.
[This is a cool picture of my street during a calm in the storm]
Actually, rereading that, that's not a great analogy. How about this: Snow a is likely a beautiful woman who has emotional issues, and ... Oh, screw it. Snow is like snow. It is very cool while it's falling majestically from the sky and blanking out your city like an eraser on a whiteboard. But it leaves you with an awful mess and a huge headache in its aftermath. At this point, it can't melt fast enough for me.
But Lil' S1 certainly enjoyed it while it was still fresh. School was canceled Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so we had five days with him home, which was trying, but the fact that we could put him in his boots and his snowsuit and take him outside for a few hours everyday made things much more bearable than they would have been otherwise. Also, he could play with his little friend down the street, which was nice.
[My car the morning after]
One thing I don't like about the snow is that it exposes my inadequacies as a preparer. I would be a terrible boy scout. I never have the appropriate gear for a situation. On Sunday we walked to our friends' house and our friend C is on his roof shoveling snow from it. His walkways are already completely clear, and he's decked out in Gor-tex with ski bib pants and buff snow boots and all that. Meanwhile, I'm wearing hand-me-down boots that my dad gave me, like, ten years ago (and that give me awful blisters), sweats over jeans, and a normal rain jacket. Also, I don't even own a snow shovel. I had to borrow his. And then I accidentally broke it (still works though), so I had to tell him I will buy him a new one. And then a small avalanche of snow slid off our roof, so I had to re-shovel the walk, so I had to ask a different friend to borrow his shovel, because of course I'm not going to ask somebody whose shovel I just broke to use it again.
But now everything is done. We have a nice clear path from the sidewalk to our front door, and our car is completely dug out -- one of them anyway. After shoveling for a few hours, I sized up the amount of effort it was going to take to dig out our other car, and thought, "nah... we can get by with one car until this stuff melts." So the only thing I have left to do snow related is buy a couple of shovels -- one for my friend, one for me for the next time it snows. Although, what I really should do is think about the things we're going to need in the summer and buy them now, while they are cheap and in stock. Now that would be smart... I probably won't do that.
[Before and after, the after photo was taken today, a week later; still a lot of snow on the ground]
OK, a few quick hitters before I go.
-Election year. After being very supportive of Bernie Sanders in the beginning, I'm now leaning begrudgingly toward Hillary. A lot of the recent criticism against Sanders is ringing true to me. It's not the electability factor (in our sharply divided, two-party system winning the primary of a major party automatically makes you electable, in my opinion). It's that the finances of his proposals -- particularly with respect to health care -- don't add up. And this is assuming he could pass them through Congress, which he obviously couldn't.
Also, it doesn't help woo voters like me, when Sanders and his supporters dismiss all criticism against him (even from people who big-picture agree with him) as "hatchet jobs" drummed up by establishment sell-outs and corporate hacks.* This is the same noxious deflection that many anti-vaxxers use to defend their ridiculous positions. Anybody who disagrees with them is ipso facto a slave to Big Pharma.
-Another thing I don't like about Sanders is that he talks about moneyed influence in much the same way Conservatives talk about big government. That is, it's a bad thing, in and of itself, without further explanation. But I think that's the wrong way to look at things. Just as big government isn't necessarily bad, neither is the influence of money in politics. Wasteful, inefficient big government is bad; the corruptive influence of money in politics is bad. But neither of things is a certainty in all cases.
For example, on a recent episode of the podcast The Weeds the hosts make the point that moneyed interests are often times more practical and empirically-based than the general public and its elected leaders and that can lead to actual compromises and results that we wouldn't achieve otherwise. Obamacare is an example of this -- the insurance industry was obviously a major reason why it passed -- and if you don't like Obamacare, then there is also the debt ceiling debacle. Absent the influence of Wall Street, Republicans might have actually been stubborn enough to take us over the cliff. Money is not ideological in the way humans are; its only goal is to make more money. This can (and often is) a very bad thing, but it can be a good thing too. (Big business often opposes discriminatory laws as well.) It just depends on how we regulate it and keep it in check.
-I tweaked my shoulder somehow and shoveling aggravated it. It's not enough that I'm going to go the doctor or anything like that, but it's definitely enough to annoy me. That's one of the underrated bad parts about getting older: You're never completely injury-free.
-S's mom left us today. S's dad has to get shoulder surgery (speaking of shoulder injuries) on Tuesday, so she has to go back to South Carolina to help him out. She's coming back in a month and will likely stay until the summer, but this month is going to be challenging. I've gotten used to sleeping uninterrupted until 7:30 every morning. There goes that luxury.
-Somebody on Facebook just posted that it's supposed to snow another couple of inches this weekend. Dear god, I hope they're wrong.
Well, that's about it. Before we go though, how about another dose of Snow?!
Until next time...
*Here's perhaps the most illustrative passage when it comes Bernie supporters dismissing all criticism against them as illegitimate:
In addition to multiple barbs thrown by the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, the Washington Post editorial board just recently unloaded on Sanders in a laughable hit piece called “Bernie Sanders’ fiction-filled campaign.” I call it laughable because the editorial’s opening argument, made with a straight face, suggests that Sanders is wrong to say Wall Street needs additional regulations because Wall Street has been thoroughly regulated.
Um, okay.
What the establishment’s collective Bernie Sanders freakout essentially boils down to is this: a candidate who now has a serious chance at becoming the next President of the United States is promising to give the power and wealth they’ve been hoarding back to the people they stole it from. And that scares the shit out of them.Right. Paul Krugman is scared shitless by Sanders' position of redistributing wealth from the top down. That's why he's been relentlessly advocating for this very thing since I started reading him. And the author doesn't even attempt to rebut WaPo's position that when Sanders is pressed about how he is going to afford all his social programs, his answers start to sound a lot like Republicans explaining their tax plans -- everything seems to rely heavily on questionable assumptions about growth and fiscal improvement.
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