29 January 2010 Snow business or no business

29 January 2010 Snow business or no business


At 0600 this morning there was no cancellation of ETSU classes. Up, and about the day’s chores. Dog dragged but apprehensive nature to her behavior as we headed down the driveway to the road and the mailbox. There is real hostility between Loki and the infamous neighbor’s dogs. Loki is right to be cautious. They were behaving like a pack intent on harming her yesterday and there is no reason to believe the levels of aggression will drop.

Stoked up the fire, punched the coffee maker into production. I love the smell of coffee in the morning. Green Mountain coffee is highly aromatic and the touch of cardamom we add to each brew makes it even better.

The winter storm warning has been pushed backward 2 hours until 1500 today. I guess that some of the air masses have slowed their progress. I haven’t had time to look at the maps and projections as thoroughly as I would like. But what I have seen makes me happy to have wood, food, and gasoline laid by for the weekend.

Classes in many local schools are cancelled. The mountain roads are not the best for large busses full of kids when they are dry. Add snow, sleet, and maybe ice, and the reason for cancellation is readily apparent.

Gloria had an orthopedics appointment in Johnson City at 1340. They called about 0815 to change her appointment time to 1140. That actually is good for us. We’ll meet at the library here in Johnson City after her injection and my classes, We’ll have time to find some light reading for the next few days, go by the pharmacy and bank, and then head home before the weather gets ugly. That is, of course, if all goes according to the National Weather Service forecast. They’ve been pretty accurate on these things so far this winter.

We start finger printing education today, lifting prints, and rolling impressions for records. I had Gloria plant the seed of an idea that I was going to fume and print that yellow bag discussed yesterday. I have no intention of doing so but the idea could feed their levels of paranoia and perhaps give them some slight pause the next time they collectively behave like middle school remedial students bent on vandalism. We’re certain the bag was retaliation for some imagined slight. We have no real idea, thought, which imagined slight it might have been. I think, as a family, they would be hard-pressed to field a combined IQ over 90. Individually, they all fall into the left lower quad of the bell curve.

We returned home almost exactly at 1400. We managed the library, the bank, and had no further business in town. The traffic was heavy as far as Jonesborough with long lines of vehicles waiting to turn into Wal-Mart. The various grocery parking lots were packed. Everyone seems to be taking this winter warning seriously.

I looked outside at 1515 and it was beginning to snow. The outside temperature here is 35.2°F so we’ll watch it snow without accumulating for a while. The predicted low is 29°F for tonight with 5 – 9 inches of accumulation. I’m hoping for five. The storm is producing ice across Arkansas, Missouri, and into Tennessee, with Memphis and Nashville becoming skating rinks. Our region is still forecast to receive snow rather than ice. The National Weather Service cautions about snow laden lines and snow laden trees. Doubtless, there will be power outages. We can hope that the previous snow and wind have decreased local potential power loss; but that will play out according to the storm’s intensity and the laws of physics.

At 1615 it is 33°F and beginning to stick on the decks and to pile up in corners. We’ve dragged the dog, put out extra turkey scratch, and are ready to hunker down and listen to the snow fall. When we were just outside, the air had the wet density, the quiet thickness that portends heavy snowfall. The song birds are feeding almost frantically. Two male Cardinals are dominating the tray feeder with the smaller and less aggressive birds working over the deck for seeds spilled by squirrels.

Classes today were about the same. We followed the path of Hitler’s post WWI rise to power. There have been many comparisons of the current U.S. economic and cultural conditions to the Weimar Republic and most lack serious validity. But the immense anger present in the tea party mobs is of concern to me. I see the anti-intellectual, anti- education, anti-immigrant, racist components of the tea party combined with the heavy financial backing of a “news” network and the prevalence of demagogues all ready to stoke the furnaces of hatred for profit and political power. It’s not hard at all to see the tea party mobs spawning an American equivalent to the brown shirt thugs of Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung. If the Christian Identity movement, largely neo-Nazis cloaked in fundamentalist Christianity can work a deal with the tea party mobs, we may see street violence taking place in our streets at levels not seen since WWII.

The CSI class was essentially a self-managed lab. Miller brought in various finger print powders and brushes, 3x5 index cards and lifting tape. Then he left for a meeting. We milled around putting prints on various objects and then bringing them into visibility with brush and powder prior to lifting them. Rather than join the clusters of people crowding around nearly every smooth surface, I pulled out my water bottle, put two fresh prints on it and then developed them. The technique worked. The documentation photos I took with my cell phone camera were less successful. I’ll need to add my camera to the daily load of gear for class. Labs of this nature are the only place you can make mistakes without something bad coming of it. Lessons learned:

1 no cell phone cameras

2 photograph entire object with prints, not just the print.

3 lay prints on white side of index card, not lined side.

4 avoid use of flash for prints under tape.

At 1711 we have ca.1/4 inch of snow on the deck. The turkey flock is feeding voraciously as if they, too, have heard the winter storm warning.

Shabbat Shalom!