Tag Archives: snow

OpenStack PTG and the Beast From The East

I’m at the OpenStack PTG in Dublin. I’ve started posting some of my videos on my personal YouTube channel – http://youtube.com/RichBowen – as well as on my work channel – http://youtube.com/RDOCommunity.

It turns out we’ve planned an event in the middle of the storm of the century, which the press is calling the Beast From The East.

So far it hasn’t amounted to a lot, but there’s a LOT more snow promised for this afternoon, and the government has warned people to stay off the roads after 4 unless they have a really good reason. Which is disappointing because I have a party planned to start at 6. I’m still trying to get hold of the venue to decide what happens next.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that I had bought my plane ticket for Sunday instead of Saturday by mistake. I quickly booked another hotel room for Saturday night, closer to the airport. Well, it turns out this may have been the most fortunate travel error I’ve made in a long time, as pretty much everything is cancelled for the next few days, and getting out of here on Saturday might have been impossible.

For now, we’re just watching the weather reports, and hoping for the best.

Trees Down

Ice

Over the last two days, we’ve had some nasty weather, primarily consisting of freezing rain that collected on everything as a thickening layer of ice. We’ve fared better that a lot of people, mostly because we don’t have any old trees. We’ve lost two branches on the large pine tree out front, and it looks like we’ve lost two trees back behind the fence, but it’s pretty hard to get back there and move around right now, so I’m not sure. The trees are beautiful, in a life-threatening kind of way, and are all bowed over in unnatural poses.

I’ve got some pictures on Flickr, and will probably have some more up later today.

After icing over, we got a heavy snowfall – by Kentucky standards – and I’ve been working from home all afternoon. I discovered that I can actually get quite a lot of work done at home. Fewer distractions, I guess. Which is odd, since The Boy was home most of the afternoon. I guess it depends more on the quality of the distractions. 🙂

No Snow Day

No Snow Day

November 22, 2008
IRW

How many “covers the ground like a blanket” poems
must we endure before
May’s rescue from
chilled and many-times-rewarmed similes?

Have you noticed how many little girls
are named April, May, June, Julia?
I’ve even met an Augusta.
But never a February.
Although, what they were thinking
when they named someone April,
I’m not sure.
Does it mean that she’s cold,
and prone to tantrums?

Do they, south of the equator,
name their children November
and January, to remind them
of the sun in the chilling depths
of a Montevideo June?

Better to name her Rhiannon,
that she can run with the wild horses
all the year long.

Or Ray, to warm us
during the bottomless chill
of the seemingly-endless winter.

Ray, who now laments
that it doesn’t, in fact,
cover the ground like a blanket,
and he must go to school.
One flake short of a blizzard,
and he is condemned to sit, wishing
he was outside in the cold snow,
wishing he was inside
in front of a warm fire,

rather than outside in the cold snow,
wishing the opposite.

Sledding

Today we went sledding on the big hill by the reservoir. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do, given that I’ve been sick most of the week, but a lot of fun.

Now I’m feeling perfectly wretched, and I think I undid whatever getting-better I had done. Or perhaps this is just the last throes of whatever it is that I’ve got.

There was a pretty good crowd of people out on the slopes, about evenly split between kids and adults. However, I don’t think I saw *any* college students out there, which strikes me as very strange. When I was in college, we went out there to sled every time there was any snow at all. And if we didn’t have sleds, we stole trays from the cafeteria and used those.