Snow Day

Today was a snow day for most of the North Texas area.  For those of you in the far north, a snow day is something that happens when the area gets so much ice and snow that schools and businesses cannot open.  In our area this is usually about an inch of ice.  It's not that we're a bunch of wusses down here, but people just don't know how to drive on this stuff.  A typical ice storm down here will usually have overturned pickup trucks all over the place, because if you have a four wheel drive pickup jacked up with 18 inch risers so you can drive through mud, then a little bit of ice shouldn't be a problem.  

There's a particular interstate exchange down the road a ways called the High Five.  it is where I-635 and US-75 meet, and is monstrous.  The primary ramp from I635 west to US75 north is uphill, and presents itself nicely to a small hill just to the west of it, a hill which is heavily populated by every news crew in town every time inclement weather comes along, each of them waiting for the inevitable bunch of over ambitious but undertalented drivers trying to go uphill in an ice storm.  usually there will be a couple of people at the bottom, stuck there until things thaw.  But this isn't a deterant to some of those yahoos.  Nope, they say, I'm a better driver than those idiots down there - all I have to do is gun it a bit and i'll coast on up this hill.  I just watch them bump into each other on the way up and down like a mechanical version of a lava lamp.

We also aren't used to preparing for this sort of event.  A typical Sunday at the local grocery store will be almost empty, with a few cashiers and stockers moving about, and the non-church crowd getting things done and out of the way before the mega-churches start letting loose.  This particular Sunday had full parking lots, pull stores, and every single cashier running at full steam.  I was in there to get a roast for dinner, so i could spend some time observing.  There were some normal shoppers in there - they were the ones that had a reasonably full cart, containing what looked to be a normal mishmash of stuff.  then there were the panickers - they were the ones with six loaves of bread, toilet paper, and bottled water, while carrying their lattes.  and then there were the other prepper types, that were stocking up on the beer and munchies, because if you were going to be trapped someplace for a while, you may as well be fat and drunk.  And this was repeated at all of our local grocery stores.  There was mention of shortages on the news that evening, to my amusement, along with the obligatory truck wrecks.

Tomorrow is also a snow day.  It didn't get warm enough to melt the ice, so no major melting.  and anything that did melt is now going to freeze even harder.  while they do treat the main roads with salt and sand, once you start getting into the neighborhoods the only movement is kids sledding down the streets, and idiots in pickup trucks going to make their name trying to drive uphill at the High Five.  

So I stayed home, along with my daughter and spouse, all of which are off from their respecttive schools.  I mainly kept an eye on everyone, watching a marathon of how it's made shows on the science channel.  Tuesday will be more of the same, but possibly with a field trip to a fast food restaurant for a chili dog.

I'll probably dig into GitHub a bit.  i took a look at it yesterday, and I do need to put some of my stuff out on a repository in some form or fashion.  I'll also finish digging into the MailKit library a bit more, just to see how the sequence of events fires off, and then start wiring it together with the bayes filter I was working on Friday.  If all goes well I might have something that works by Wednesday.  Heck, even if it all blows up I might still have something by then, just not as polished.