This week felt much like running into a brick wall1, where the bricks were meetings pushed up against meetings, packed next to classes and mortared together with conference calls and email blitzes. In the dust bunnies of time which remained I needed to do all of the essentials of my life: lecture writing, meeting material reading, quiz creating, emailing, memo drafting. Sleeping. Eating. Prioritized in roughly that order.Friday morning, between meeting one and meeting two, one of my colleagues (who is teaching the other section of the intro chemistry course) casually inquires, "So what are you going to do about the hurricane and your class on Monday?"
"The WHAT?"
Somehow I had completely missed the news that Hurricane Sandy is headed our way. The current track is expected to put the eye of the storm directly over us sometime Monday night.
Time to practice looking up again?
1. The wall here is metaphorical. Unlike last week where the wall was literally the floor. My knee has turned amazing colors, my face did not (for which I am quite grateful!). The knee may need a consultation with my orthopedist, but as long as I'm judicious about it, it works. And as of yesterday, I have my glasses back, repaired and beautiful. The guys at the little optical shop are amazing. No charge.
The type is too small to read in this form, but you can read this XKCD here which recounts (via acutal quotes from the NWS forecast discussions) the life cycles of two late season hurricanes. Best line: "There are no clear reasons...and I'm not going to make one up...to explain the recent strengthening of Epsilon and I am just giving the facts...However, I still have to give an intensity forecast...and the best best is that Epsilon will become a remnant low. I've heard that before about Epsilon, haven't you?"
I'm enough of a weather junky (if you haven't discovered the forecast discussions, where the weather wizards let down their hair, might I recommend them?) to remember reading these updates on Epsilon and Zeta.
I am married to a meteorologist. He's an IT director now, but majored in meteorology in college, so he does read those forecast discussions and understand them! (Then he translates them from Weatherese so the rest of us mere mortals can get the idea.)
ReplyDeleteThe meteorologist is camping with our little Cub Scout right now, and my own college kid has returned to Philly, so all I get to do is sit here and worry.
I'm trying not to worry about the one that we have in Washington, DC....
DeleteHang in there!