Feb 1, 2011

St.Louis is Standing By

Yesterday, Washington University took the unprecedented step of closing the school due to inclement weather. This is something that hasn't happened in 15 years, so this is a fairly significant indication of what the school is expecting. They closed the campus at 3pm yesterday to allow us to get home and avoid rush hour (it was also beginning to have freezing rain), board up the windows, stockpile bread, whatever. The weather media was also blowing this way big, using words like "disaster," "historic," "cataclysmic," and so on. So far what has materialized is about a quarter inch of ice on everything and a few inches of snow. That's it. I came in to school today to get some work done and I took the city buses, which are running with few exceptions. This morning the winter storm warning was cancelled and replace with a blizzard warning. It is getting colder, but not break-out-the-old-brandy-we're-going-to-die kind of cold.

Of course, the gods of irony are going to make sure now that my frozen corpse is discovered like that of the poor squirrel, frozen solid, leaning into the wind with its paws covering its face.

On a lighter note, I'm going to New Orleans sunday. I'm still a little concerned about the road conditions getting out of town, and I'm hoping that the major interstates will be clear by the time we leave sunday morning. It's going to be an epic trip. We've got two cars (one of them is mine) and 7 drivers/passengers between us. It's about an 11 hour drive down, so we'll definitely be sharing driving responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the trip, actually. Down south, following the course of the Mississippi river to its delta, traveling through some of the poorest areas of the United States.

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Medium is the message

I moved the blog again. I deleted the Tumblr account and moved everything to Medium.com, a more writing-centric website. medium.com/@wende