9.17.2020 – Hurricane Sally

Hurricane Sally
Rained all night, rained all day, please
Sally go away

I remember back in the early days of online news, we would have lengthy conference calls with the web teams from multiple TV stations to discuss issues and latest options for online news.

It seems like a good deal of our conversations were about online school closings.

I have a very clear memory of the first fall WZZM13 had a website and I was told that the station needed a way to post school closings online.

I had been in news just long enough (the station website had launched in July) to know what questions to ask.

Who?

YOU!

What?

List of all schools closed by weather!

Where?

Online!

When?

Tonight!

Why?

It’s what we do here!

How?

That’s why we hired you!

So I got to work and repurposed my High School Football Scoreboard so that school names and closing information could be added and posted online.

It was just a simple write to text file.

Someone had to type in names and hit upload.

It wasn’t great but it worked.

And I knew we had to do better.

The newsroom wanted bells, whistles, times, dates and most importantly, a way for someone else to enter the information.

A system were school administrators could log in and enter information was develped.

And whenever those people entered information like School & Events Cancelled, or School Support Team # 2, was entered those & and # symbols crashed the system.

But we learned.

All the web teams at all the stations learned.

And we all talked about it on our calls.

At least the people who worked up North.

I remember how the web people who worked in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida all laughed at us.

WINTER STORMS?

SNOW?

SCHOOL CLOSINGS?

They claimed they never used them.

They claimed they didn’t need to.

They claimed that if winter was bad enough, people in the South were smart enough to stay home.

A few months later the first Hurricane Season hit.

Then those people all screamed for school closing tools.

A few years later we moved south.

The first fall we lived in Georgia it started to rain on Labor Day and it seemed to rain until Halloween.

The local lakes that experts said wouldn’t fill up for 20 years filled up and overflowed in 20 days.

My wife called me at work.

Did you know, she asked, they close school down here because … of RAIN?

I did.

8.23.2020 – band between rainbows

band between rainbows
known as Alexander’s band
who first described it

What is a double rainbow?
A double rainbow is a wonderful sight where you get two spectacular natural displays for the price of one.

Surprisingly, this phenomenon is actually relatively common, especially at times when the sun is low in the sky such as in the early morning or late afternoon. The second rainbow is fainter and more ‘pastel’ in tone than the primary rainbow because more light escapes from two reflections compared to one.

The secondary rainbow is also dispersed over a wider area of the sky. It is nearly twice as wide as the primary bow.

A key feature of double rainbows is that the colour sequence in the second rainbow is reversed, so instead of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), the colours appear in VIBGYOR order.

The dark band between the two rainbows is known as Alexander’s band, after Alexander of Aphrodisias who first described it in 200AD.

Who knew they were common, cool, reversed and it took until 200AD to see one.

3.10.2020 – No enthusiasm

No enthusiasm
stuck in a rut, routine, meh
No motivation

Meh.

It is a real word.

A word in the dictionary/

A word expressing a lack of interest or enthusiasm.

As an adjective, uninspiring or unexceptional.

According to wikipedia, meh’s popularity surged after its use on the American animated television series The Simpsons. It was first used in the 1994 episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts”, when a librarian reacts to Lisa’s surprise that voting records are not classified.

Meh was added to the Collins Dictionary of the English Language in 2008.

I call it stuck.

Stuck in a rut.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes stuck in a rut as dysthymia — the mild, chronic cousin of depression, the symptoms of which are low energy, low mood, loss of interest, and general anhedonia (loss of pleasure).

I got that from the article 10 Signs That You’re in a Rut by Tania Luna in the magazine, Psychology Today.

She writes:

Let’s talk rut diagnosing, beginning with a checklist. The more items you find yourself checking off, the more likely that you are stuck.

10 – Day to day, you don’t look forward to much (other than maybe sleeping or just getting through whatever you’re doing).

9 – You’d like to get your creative juices flowing, but it seems someone left an empty juice bottle in the fridge.

8 – Even though you keeping checking things off your to do list, it doesn’t feel like you are getting much done.

7 – Your days all blur together, and it’s not weird to look up blinking and ask, “Is this Tuesday or Thursday?”

6 – By the time you get “free time” you are too tired to do something interesting with it or are just plain unmotivated.

5 – If you answered “How are you?” genuinely, you’d say something like, “Meh.”

4 – You fantasize about getting away (and not just away on vacation).

3 – You’d like to add something new to your life, but you’re sure that you’ll never have enough time and/or energy for it.

2 – You’re getting sick of hearing yourself complain about feeling stressed, tired, and unfulfilled.

1 – … and the Number One rut symptom: Even though you think you’d be happier if you made a change, it’s more comforting to stay the same and mope about it.

I scored 10 for 10.

Maybe I got this dysthymia.

Maybe it’s March, before the madness.

Maybe it’s Corona fatigue.

Maybe it’s Election Fatigue.

Maybe it’s the 10 days of rain in the forecast.

Maybe.

Meh.

3.5.2020 – driving rain driving

driving rain driving
nothing delicious to it
dark that absorbs light

“There’s really something rather delicious about walking in the rain,” says Willie Keith walking in the rain in New York City in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny

“You wouldn’t think so if you had do it,” says his girlfriend.

It started raining here in Georgia sometime in December or November.

In the last three months Georgia has had over 25 inches of rain.

50 inches of rain in a year is normal for Georgia.

The current 14 day outlook from today shows only 4 days without rain in the forecast.

That 50 inches per year average is more than Michigan’s 33 inches of rain but Michigan has 52 inches of snow.

Looking out at the rain is down right depressing.

Driving in it.

Driving in the rain.

Driving in the driving rain.

Operating a motor vehicle at speeds that should scare me over rain slicked pavement that not only takes away my ability to stop my vehicle but through some trick of physics, also absorbs the light right out of the air so I can’t see why I might need to stop my vehicle.

This is stupid.

This is scary.

It is scary that even though I know its stupid, I do it anyway.

It is stupid that I am not more scared.

Why do I do this?

Like the people in their accidents will say, “I never think it will happen to me.”

2.11.2020 – day long drip drip drip

day long drip drip drip
clouds to roof, through the ceiling
buckets by my door

Plumber once told me that he had to remember three things.

Payday was friday.

Don’t chew your fingernails.

Water flows downhill.

Keep those three things in mind and you can succeed as a plumber.

I have been reminded of water flowing downhill for the last week or more.

Been raining so long the roof of my building is full.

Leaks, previously unknown, are making their presence known all around me.

Drip Drip Drip.

I work in the online world.

I am surrounded by cutting edge technology.

And buckets.

I pretend that the building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s buildings were famous for bad roofs.

One home owner wrote about his FLW designed house, “The roof design itself had some interesting design issues that almost guaranteed water penetration.”

On the other hand, another FLW home owner wrote about their leaky roof, “that is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

Drip Drip Drip.

All day long.

Guaranteed water penetration.

I like that.

In my techno world, it fits.

No leaks here.

Lots of guaranteed water penetration.