weather

The last three days

Friday was pretty uneventful, and even yesterday wasn’t terribly exciting by any real standard. It was warmer, certainly, to the point where you could wander outside in short sleeves and not feel uncomfortable — a far cry from the past few weeks we’ve had. There’s a chance of snow again in next week’s forecast, but hopefully it won’t impede my work trip to Stony Brook, which thanks to illness and weather I’ve already had to reschedule twice. And it also won’t impede my grumbling about how my parents managed to escape the worst of winter, leaving it all to me to enjoy.

Last night, I watched the 1977 horror movie The Sentinel, which is probably most notorious for casting genuinely deformed people as denizens of hell. That — spoiler warning — comes late in the film, and it’s just the one long scene, but however effective it might have been it’s also in very questionable taste. As for the rest of the movie…well, I call it a horror movie, since that seems like the obvious choice, but by the end of it I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I watching. There are parts that are ridiculously campy, some terrible acting — sadly, much of it from the film’s lead — and yet there are also parts that are really fairly creepy. Burgess Meredith is rather good in it, and Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken show up as a pair of detectives. But it’s such a weird movie, with such a strangely varied cast, even beyond Meredith, Wallach, and Walken. The trailer doesn’t really do it justice, and while I do think it was a terrible movie, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t enjoy it.

Then today I went to my writing group, and I penned/keyboarded this:

They found her outside the cabin, what was left of the old Wilson place out on the end of North Hadley Road, just half a mile from the edge of the woods and the county line. She had been left there overnight; the ME wouldn’t commit to a time of death, but preliminary tests suggested sometime between nine and ten the night before. That explained the rigor, Stock thought, and more importantly the dress. It had turned cold overnight, an unexpected frost that still hung in the morning air, but the girl was dressed for summer, her clothes a flimsy, gauzy white. Like an angel, Stock thought, and then quashed the thought down to the back of his mind. It wouldn’t help him any to start thinking like that again.

She had been strangled. Meyers thought they might get prints, but Stock wasn’t too hopeful. The body was too well staged, too precise, to expect that the perp had been that sloppy. The girl looked almost peaceful, if you ignored the bruises around her neck where the air had been cut off, ignored the too complete stillness of her body propped up against the oak tree. There was no sign of a struggle beyond all that, which suggested that she’d been killed somewhere else and moved, despite there being no other tracks but their own leading up this way. Meyers already had the sherrif’s men cordoning off a wider area, bagging anything that might look like evidence. Stock had just shrugged when the other man asked him if he’d had any theories.

The cabin was abandoned, half burned down in ’91, and nobody, least of all Red Wilson, had lived out here since then. Stock didn’t even know if Wilson still owned the property, which had stretched all the way to Potter County when he, Stock, had been a boy. But if he did, it wasn’t doing him much good these days, half-senile and bed-ridden like the man was reportedly supposed to be. Stock knew there were places that fall into disuse because nobody wants them, wants to be reminded of what happened there; there are places where darkness sets in, makes itself comfortable, sets up shop. The Wilson place had been well on its way to becoming one of those places even before the fire. The dead girl just made it clear the transformation was now complete.

“You recognize her?” Meyers asked, and Stock looked up.

“What?” he said. He tried keeping the surprise off his face. “Nah, why’d you ask that?”

“Dunno,” the other man said. “You just had one of your looks, is all.”

Can you tell I also watched a couple of True Detective episodes today as well?

That, more or less, was my weekend.

Monday and Tuesday

Yesterday was Presidents Day, so of course I spent it doing laundry.

Today it snowed, again. We certainly didn’t need that, but it only snowed for a little while, in the morning, so I guess that’s okay. And there’s no more snow in the forecast for the next week, which is even better.

Today was also the first time I was back in the office since last Monday, which was odd. I have a mountain of deadlines, with several dozen more fast approaching, and I’m just trying to keep on top of them as much as possible.

Friday and Saturday

I worked from home yesterday, more in anticipation of a terrible commute than anything else. My boss texted all of us to say she didn’t mind if we all telecommuted, so who was I to argue with that?

The weather actually wasn’t so bad, quite sunny for a change and warm enough to actually melt some of the snow for the first time in what seemed like forever. It snowed again today, but yesterday was actually pretty nice once it actually got underway.

Still, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to work from home. And, anyway, the LIRR was canceling trains when I first woke up, so it was probably for the best. Still, it’s a bit weird that the only day I was in the office last week was Monday, the one day a week I usually work from home.

Last night, I re-watched Before Sunrise, I suppose because it was Valentine’s Day. Never let it be said I don’t have a romantic bone in my body, even if I did watch it all by my lonesome.

Tonight, I watched the much less romantic The Counselor. The AV Club described it as “existential Elmore Leonard,” and it does sometimes feel more like an intellectual exercise than a movie, even if it’s the exercise of a decidedly gruesome intellect. It was good, but I don’t know that it was especially fun.

And that was the past couple of days. It’s a three-day weekend, which is really nice, and it’s not even supposed to snow…much.

Wednesday and Thursday

I can’t believe it’s only Thursday.

Yesterday, I was on back on campus again, at the second of three schools for the semester. The weather was quite cold, but all of my meetings went well and it was a good day.

Then sometime in the middle of the night it started to snow.

Actually, before that, the third school I was planning to visit today preemptively cancelled all its morning classes and office hours, and it was already looking fairly likely that the afternoon classes and hours would follow suit. Most of my scheduled appointments were in the afternoon, but still, I didn’t much like my chances. The school’s an hour away, on what promised to be icy roads, and I went to bed last night pretty secure that come morning I’d have to e-mail all my appointments to cancel.

You know, for the second time. Oh yeah, this was the school I was originally planning to visit a couple of weeks ago when I got sick.

For a while after I woke up, it still seemed really uncertain what was going to happen. I knew I probably wasn’t driving out to the campus, but did that mean I’d have to go into the office? The trains were running, or at least the network news and MTA claimed they were, but it seemed like things were just getting worse. The snow really started coming down — I joked a little later on Twitter that the flakes were as big as birds. At least I think it was a joke — and even if it turned to rain, any commute seemed like a wet and sloppy mess waiting to happen.

So I decided to text my boss about working from home. And maybe five minutes after that, I got an e-mail saying that the office had closed because of the weather. So the whole thing was kind of moot.

I managed to re-schedule all of my appointments save one, which will just need to be moved from morning to afternoon, and I’m going to try again in another two weeks. Of course, after sickness and a foot more of snow, the universe may be trying to tell me something. (Then again, I thought that last year when I contacted over a hundred faculty at one school and got no appointments. And that place turned out to be my very successful Tuesday.) Hopefully the third time will be the charm, and the school (or I) won’t catch fire or something.

I didn’t do a whole lot today. More shoveling and snow-blowing than was probably wise, especially since there’s more snow predicted on the way. Actually, there’s a chance of snow and rain from now until well into next week, so I don’t think we’ve escaped this just yet. I read a little, did a little work — I mean, I did have my laptop up and running already — and that’s about it. I have no idea if tomorrow’s snow will be enough to close the office again, or even just to keep me home. It’s been a long enough week, and I’m tired enough, that it seems strangely unfair that today wasn’t Friday.

Basically, I’ll do what I did today: figure it out in the morning, I guess.

Monday and Tuesday

I’m getting pretty tired of winter. This winter, to be specific, when it seems like we’re constantly under a new major storm advisory. There’s snow predicted for the next three days, with the same number of storms colliding in our area, polar-vortexing us into submission again. Which I suppose means we won’t see a thaw until sometime in 2018. I’m just tired of the snow that doesn’t melt, or melts only a little and then re-freezes later in the day. It’s not the cold or the longer nights. I can handle those. I just wish winter would knock it off for a while.

Meanwhile, the stray cat seems to have left the garage when I scared it out of hiding. The garage is pretty tightly packed with stuff, but I did a pretty thorough search — tripping and twisting my ankle badly in the process, I might add. (The ankle gave me some grief last night, but ice and acetaminophen seem to have done the trick.) If the cat is still out there, hidden in some inaccessible nook or corner, I don’t really want to think about what its lack of movement might suggest. I’d much rather it ran out the other night and discovered a warmer place to hang out.

We should all be so lucky.

Today I was on campus, talking with professors, which is that thing I have to do several times a year. It went well, I think. And I managed to finish reading the last ten pages of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary while I hid out from the cold in the campus library. (I really liked the book, so more on that later.)

Tomorrow, though…well, there might be more snow. We’ll just have to see.