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The chickens started laying eggs again. Bobby got two eggs yesterday and two today--all greenish-blue from the Ameraucanas--out of the coop. However, since egg-laying is motivated by day-length, not by temperature or any magical!animal!intuition of impending spring, then this doesn't mean that we're due to experience spring-like weather anytime soon. And we haven't. It's barely cracked freezing all week--the warmest day in a week being the day of the effing ice storm--and we're due for more of the same this coming week. We got two more inches (5 cm) of snow today. I think I'm turning into a Northerner; I was all like "Two inches ... yaaaawn." This is what the NOAA weather forecast for Manchester looks like for the coming week:

Image )

This looks like our weather forecast for the past two months. A red "Hazardous Weather Outlook" at the top. Weather icons that look like a kid's arts-and-crafts project that involves making snowflakes out of coffee filters. And temperatures where the highs are our usual lows and lows are just OMGWTFthisisMarylanddammit.

I hate to keep talking about the ice storm, but I'm going to have to because our trees are still covered in freaking ice. Yes, a good bit has either melted or (more likely) fallen off. (Piles of ice pieces from the white pines turned the driveway lovingly cleared by Bobby into a miniature version of the Helcaraxë. I was mostly excited today about the snow today because it would cover up all the shards of ice on the ground.) The branches of the Japanese maple no longer point groundward, true, but the tree is still encased in ice, just somewhat less ice than it was a week ago. The annoying thing is that if we drive even five minutes south, most of the ice is gone. As of yesterday, people were still having their power restored. We went out to a late dinner on Friday and were talking to the restaurant owner, and she told us that she had a man come in earlier in the evening whose house was 35F and who was sleeping in his winter coat. :^|

But spring is coming, right? The long-range forecast apparently shows a rapid warm-up into an early spring by the end of the month. The chickens are laying again, we've started all of our indoor seeds, and we've ordered a package of bees ... spring better be coming.

As perhaps evidenced by the fact that I just spent a whole post talking about the weather, my weekend has been pretty dull. I spent most of the weekend working on my final essay for my Enlightenment class. It has to be 17-20 pages. Between yesterday and today, I wrote 13. Yay me. It's not due for a week, but I am taking the month of March off from grad school and starting back in April, so the sooner I finish, the sooner I can begin my break.

Cold & Ice

Feb. 6th, 2014 09:26 pm
dawn_felagund: The Pillbury Doughboy looking angry as he's poked. (doughboy)
Well, now on top of our winter woes, I have a cold. Bobby has been fighting one off for days, and it was inevitable that I'd catch it, and I did.

It was back to work today; Baltimore County schools opened regular time. (Carroll County schools remained closed since we got hit with the worst of the storm.) The drive to work this morning was quite startling. Branches and trees are down everywhere. The damage is substantial. It looks worse than the tropical storms of the past few years.

Everything here is still coated in ice. Drive even just five minutes south, and most of the trees have thawed, but it doesn't appear to have gotten above freezing here today. We lost another branch in the yard from one of the maples that took down part of the chicken run. Luckily, the damage was not bad, and Bobby was able to repair it this afternoon.

Freyja was due to be spayed today, so we loaded her into her carrier to drive her to the vet's office this morning. Ten minutes on the road and they called to cancel her appointment because the office is still without power. So we turned around and drove her home. She is spared again! She was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but we had to reschedule for today because the after-school program started up Tuesday, and we would have had to pick her up right in the middle of it, which was impossible. Hopefully three is a charm and her next appointment will actually happen.

I am almost ready to start writing my final paper for my current class. I really drag these things out ridiculously. I have one more article to read; I have written a draft thesis statement and a quick outline, so it will just be a matter, this weekend, of writing each section. If I can do two or three sections a day, then most of the paper will be done this weekend. Those who think I work too hard will be proud that I downloaded another book by Rousseau yesterday (my Kindle has 3G--dangerous because I can continue to download books even without Internet or power) that I do not actually intend to read for my paper. I decided against it. I have already read three books by Rousseau in excess of what I was required to read for the class, plus the usual collection of articles and book chapters, so I decided to give this one a pass.

This means that I am actually reading something at the moment that is not school-related! (It is still academic-related, for my "Tree of Tales" paper ... baby steps, people!) The book is called The Song of Middle-earth by David Harvey. I'm actually rather disappointed in it so far. It was written about 30 years ago, so the Silm and UT were available, but the book seems to mostly summarize the texts. How annoying! I would assume that if someone is buying a book about Tolkien, then one has actually read Tolkien. He frequently reaches the point where I think he is going to get into something deep and thought-provoking, and then just kind of peters out. He makes some good points about Tolkien's legendarium not being derivative; he starts to delve into world cosmogony but flakes out with a statement that Ainulindalë shares several themes with other world myths. Aaaaand? (He also falls into the trap that I've found to be rather frequent of stating that a particular archetype is "common" in world creation stories when reading a boatload of world creation stories has convinced me that this is not the case.) He also doesn't seem to be much of a writer, and it is hard sometimes to see how his ideas are connected. (This reminds me of an objective that I frequently include when writing Written Content goals for student IEPs: The student will use transitions to show the connections among ideas within and between paragraphs in a multi-paragraph composition. He could use that objective in his hypothetical IEP.) Since he deals with mythological themes and cosmogony in particular, then it was a book that I pretty much had to read before undertaking the next revision of my paper, and I do hope my opinion of it improves. But so far, I'm not enjoying it much more than if I'd read the other work by Rousseau, and that is saying something.
The narrative is here. The power was flickering really badly and Photobucket literally took hours and multiple tries to get all of the pictures uploaded, so I wanted to at least get the original post up.

Ice Storm Pictures )

Ice.

Feb. 5th, 2014 02:27 pm
dawn_felagund: (mother nature bats last)
This post has a soundtrack to go with it!

Ice Soundtrack )

We were predicted to get an ice storm last night into tomorrow morning, and we did. Oh we did. We were confident enough that schools would at least be delayed this morning, so we stayed up later than usual last night and watched the last of our snow day movies. (We have a tradition of watching 80's dance movies on nights when we know schools will be closed or delayed the next day for winter weather. We've already worked through Dirty Dancing and Footloose, so that left Flashdance as the only one remaining in our collection. If we get any additional snow days--and if we get the monstrous storm predicted for this weekend, there is a good chance we will--then we will have to settle for something else.) We went to bed just after midnight and, around 12:15, heard the start of the distinctive and disturbing tick tick tick of ice hitting the windows.

The Rest below the Cut! )

ETA ... pictures are up here.

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