If God really wants you to touch the sky, He'll give you wings.
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« September 2009 |
Main
| December 2009 »
As many of you may already know, less than one week after leaving AccuWeather, State College was hit by a crippling and baffling snow storm. It has broken all sorts of records, according to an unnamed meteorologist at AccuWeather who may or may not be called Jesse:
1. Earliest Measurable Snow. This means that no measurable snow that we know of was earlier than this snow, the snow that fell less than a week after leaving AccuWeather.
2. Greatest October Snow. This means that no snow at any time in October was more than this snow, the snow that fell less than a week after leaving AccuWeather.
3. Greatest Monthly October Snow. This means that in one storm we exceeded that greatest amount of snow to occur in the whole month of October, less than (you get the picture.)
4. Greatest number of tree injuries and deaths ever.
Okay, I added that last one. But driving home from Penn State today I passed an enormous number of fallen trees and branches. In many cases I saw beautiful photo opportunities - brilliant red leaves partially covered in white, and branches drooping low as if bowing to some unseen force (old man winter, perhaps, who went missing several years ago while I Still Worked At AccuWeather (you get the picture.) I didn't get many chances to photograph anything, but am hopeful it will snow tonight (and not harm a single tree, natch) and I can get some pics tomorrow.
Some of you are probably thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but was it really that bad?" I could say, "Heck Yeah!" but that wouldn't convince many of you, so I will instead excerpt an actual Real Live New Organization, WPXI.com. How bad was the snow? Well...
That's right - EVEN TAILGATING IS CANCELLED.
That bad.
(Originally published 3/14/06, 38below.)
 This weekend we had a mini crisis at the Schaad Hacienda. A set of keys, which may or may not belong to Alert Reader Tammy (who may or may not be my wife) was misplaced. Misplacing your keys is one of those Great Hassles. First, you can't really go anywhere unless you make make your car start via telekinesis or something. Second, you can't really buy anything at the grocery store or rent any movies because your little tags that you put on your keychain because it's so convenient are now missing. And third, in order to get back to Start you have to replace all of the keys, which means going to the Key Making Place and listen to that high pitched Key Making Noise which always gives me a terrible headache.
The psychology of the Missing Thing is interesting. Initially you're not too worried because the number of places you have yet to search is rather large. And they include all of the obvious places, because you really haven't started yet. So we checked those first: the purse, the coat pockets, the counter top. No keys. Then we started down the list of less obvious locations, still not too terribly concerned: piles of household debris, old pants, in-between the car seats, the computer desk. Nothing. Now we were starting to get worried, and were forced to check the Insane Locations (and I'm not making this up:) the refrigerator, the freezer, the oven (yes, the oven,) under the sink, in the shower (yes, the shower,) and finally, every one of the six trash bags in the garage because Carl had the bright idea to clean the house over the weekend and generate a lot of trash. Nada.
Well, now we were pretty desperate, and thinking that it was all over. We were making mental plans to copy this key, exchange that key, and rebuild the entire collection. I even started calling restaurants to see if they had found any keys. (Some of the restaurants we had actually been to recently, too.) It was then that Alert Reader Tammy, who may or may not have been the person who lost the keys, came into my work room and asked, "How much do you love me?" Now, you know when you hear THAT phrase what immediately follows is never Good News. So I mustered all of my finely-honed husbandly skills and said, "Where did you find them?"
It turns out they were in the purse all along. Under. The. Cell. Phone.
Crisis averted. I cleverly bit my tongue but two billion brain cells exploded instantly from the effort.
Apparently the Mayans are getting all sorts of tech support questions about the end of the world. Fourth-graders are actually emailing saying they are too young to die. And a mother was afraid that she wouldn't live to see them grow up.
These are definitely not the kind of people who should see the new movie 2012, which coincidentally comes out with enough time to produce a sequel before 2012 is fully here (the date the calendar supposedly runs out is 12/21/2012 which has enough 1s and 2s in there to blow your mind. I mean, something has to happen right?)
In any event, the offical word is that the world won't end on that date. But a archaeological relic, called "Monument Six," mentions 2012 and a Mayan God called Bolon Yokte, who is normally associated with war and creation.
The passage in question has an inopportune crack over the last bit, making it almost illegible. The best guess as to what this says? "He will descend from the sky."
Now, I don't know about you, but when a civilization that is clearly here thanks to the aliens writes about a calendar ending in 2012, and a mysterious Mayan God of war descending from the heavens, I get a little nervous. Incidentally, Bolon Yokte DOES rearrange into "On to Elk Boy." I'm just saying.
More here about the Mayans and their tech support.
 The moon. If you believe that sort of thing.
I'm not an Official Science Person so when I heard that we were going to shoot at the moon I thought, "What about the moon people? Won't that upset them?" I called NASA to get some sort of official response to this, but all I got was, "The WHAT? Who is this again?" I hung up before they could trace the call because they might be able to find me then, even with all of the tinfoil I've stapled on my walls and ceiling. Okay, and floors, but that's mostly lying loose.
In any event, this is what I know so far from the Official Record. Apparently, NASA, completely bored with the Sun lately because of the record low solar activity and total lack of apocalyptic solar flares, decided to look for water on the moon. After a cursory look they decided there wasn't any water.
Scientist 1: "I don't see any water."
Scientist 2: "Me neither."
After some more thought, they concluded there was probably only one place the water might be hiding.
Scientist 1: "I think the water is hiding under ground."
Scientist 2: "Okay."
So they hatched a plan to get to the water. This was actually a long process, because they developed all sorts of ideas that seemed ludicrous.
Scientist 1: "Let's shoot the moon with a rocket."
Scientist 2: "That seems ludicrous."
Scientist 1, also called Dan: "What about creating a giant robot with digging scoop hands sort of like Edward Scissorhands?"
Scientist 2, also called Bill: "Let's shoot the moon with a rocket."
The general plan was to shoot a rocket into the moon, in a very specific place along a crater where there was thought to be some water (a 7-11 convenience store) and shoot the landing site with a camera, which would take pictures of the water shooting out of the moon, the hole in the 7-11, and the little convenience store moon men running around with the hands waving in the air, all panicked-like. (Because they weren't going to get the memo in time.)
The entire process apparently worked very well, except as far as the moon men were concerned, and now NASA has to sift through all of the data to find out if anything more than a super mega big gulp slurpee has turned up. Already a number of conspiracy theories are turning up, which I'm happy to support and share.
The first goes something like this: Since we never really landed on the moon, what are we shooting? People offering this theory say we actually bombed a 7-11 in Rochester, NY. By accident. And are now trying to cover it up by saying there's water in Rochester after all, which is a surprise to many.
The second goes something like this: We have all of these SDI/"Star Wars" weapons but testing them on Earth is generally frowned upon, so we have to bomb the moon with them. This would be entirely acceptable, except that the moon men would probably have been roasted and not around to tell us it was a surgical water strike, and so there goes that idea.
The last has something to do with the area involved. The crater is called Cabeus, which may sound like a mythological attack dog but is really named after Niccolò Cabeo, whom we all know was an Italian Jesuit philosopher. So why does the U.S. want to bomb the Jesuits? Exactly.
As for me, I know the whole thing was financed by Hollywood - the only group with more money than the government - and will be used in the new apocalyptic movie 2013, a sequel to 2012 which will feature even more destruction and special effects, all the way to the moon, Alice.
*BOOM being the sound of fireworks, of course.
Today was my last day at AccuWeather, Inc. - the World's Weather Leader™ and supplier of a job for the last 243 months. I learned a lot of things at AccuWeather - largely because AccuWeather has been my only real employer. I've worked there all of my adult life** and as a result have picked up a number of important ideas, facts, examples of appropriate/inappropriate behavior, etc. I'll likely be summarizing these in blog posts over the next few weeks, which will also appear in my forthcoming book, "AccuWeather: Picking Up a Number of Important Ideas, Facts, Examples of Appropriate/Inappropriate Behavior, Etc."
Thinking back on the last 20 years and 3 months is difficult, because as anyone who knows me can attest I don't even remember what I did last week, or what I ate this morning, so some of this is likely to be tarnished by the passage of time. But a few early thoughts:
1. When you drop a quarter in the break room, in front of a massive vending machine that is your only hope for something even resembling a lunch, the quarter will bounce twice, roll in a circle, and then mysteriously shoot off in the direction of the vending machine. It will slide under a space that is too big for your hand, and you will hurt yourself when you try to save it, and your lunch, by chasing it under there with your fingers which incidentally you need to work the mouse and do your job. But okay the Reese's Cups looked really good what was I going to do?
2. Co-workers love bagels. In fact, their brains orient any time bagels are brought in twice, quickly calculating the time between deliveries and then extrapolating into the future when the next box should arrive. And on that day, they will appear mysteriously from cubicles, offices, caves, weather tunnels hidden deep below weather headquarters, etc., looking for bagels. "What? No...no bagels?" They can hardly believe it. "No...bagels? You didn't bring bagels? Okay, but you know I extrapolated even though it took me three hours and there should be bagels today but okay..."
3. Deadlines are for wimps. Deadlines imply that you actually have some time to do something, like a project, a report, a trip to the break room, or buttering a bagel. Sure, some deadlines are generous, like measured in leap years, and other deadlines are less so, measured in the time it takes to butter and eat your bagel. But NO DEADLINE. As in, "This new project was due yesterday and so you've failed, miserably, but do what you can now." Now that takes some serious raw skill. Fortunately I'd built a special head-bagel-harness that would allow me to eat a bagel without hands. That left me free to work and fail, miserably, but enjoy a whole wheat bagel with butter in the process.
There are other things learned of course. I became pretty good at graphic design, which can be turned into something resembling a career with a little luck. I learned what a warm front, a cold front, an occluded front, and a compensation front are and believe me you don't want to encounter a compensation front, particularly the united kind, because frustration and some sort of annoying precipitation, like cold drizzle, usually results.
But - it's all over and new things are waiting on the horizon. Or as Byron said:
Between two worlds Life hovers like a star,
'Twixt Night and Morn, upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of Empires heave but like some passing waves.
**Okay, some would argue that I'm still not very adult-like, but it's being used here just for the purposes of furthering this blog post. Thank you.
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