Personal Note: And the snow, snow, snow came down, down, down ...

[nebroadwe]

Local official snow total: 15". (Somewhat more at the airport.)

Chance that aliens have infiltrated my employing institution under cover of bad weather: 80%.

Two snow days in a row: priceless.

And for everything else, there's a shovel. I cleared the balcony yesterday morning during the lull in the sleet/snow changeover and cleared it again this morning, to the bemusement of one of my neighbors. But since nateprentice reported the collapse of his patio roof and another friend a downed tree in her backyard, I figured it was worth it. I'll be out later today to shake the snow off the bushes again; some of them are bowed right to the ground. Clearing them off yesterday during the storm was fun, in a childlike, look-ma-I'm-covered-with-snow-now! way, but not all that effective. I'm sure the snowplow guy working the parking lot at that point thought I was nuts. (The association sent a plow and an earth mover, which was impressive. We've got some eight- or ten-foot high heaps of packed snow in the corners, which I don't doubt are going to get a lot of use by the neighborhood kids over the next few days. Heck, I might try mountaineering up some of them myself. :-)

Got a little further forward on my brand new story about Ozai banishing Zuko, which is to say I laid out the beginning and the end and discovered a plausibility hitch in the middle, which will need to be thrashed out (perhaps today? C'mon, Muse, work with me here!). Mostly, though, I watched Babylon 5, which I never quite managed to see through when it was on broadcast. I love space opera, especially with Cistercians. I think I must begin acquiring copies of this for my personal library now ...

ETA: Shook snow off the bushes and onto myself, en masse. If I'm going to keep doing this, I think I need to dig out my snowpants from wherever they're stored. At least this time I knew to tie off the tops of my boots.

ETA 2: They're sending us back to work tomorrow. I guess the alien coup has been defeated. Sigh.

Comments

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I really need to watch Bab 5. I have a friend who was highly immersed in it and thought I'd love it. I tried watching the library's copy, sadly, it was so ripped and skipped, it was unviewable.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Argh. That's so annoying. I do recommend B5, though like most television series it takes a season or so to really get rolling. (And to hire Bruce Boxleitner, whee!) For all that it was cutting edge technically (it was the first SF series to go heavily into CGI for its effects), it has an oddly retro feel to it -- you get the impression that the people responsible for it grew up reading Ray Bradbury and Doc Smith and watching The Prisoner and The Twilight Zone as well as ST:TOS. I love the fact that it's got not only a long-term plot but long-term character arcs (arcs! plural!) that actually work -- that it gives Walter Koenig a fantastic role as a recurring villain -- and that, while it does generally follow the late 20th century SF treatment of religious belief and commitment by making it the domain of the Other (the alien or the non-protagonist human), it takes the ethical implications of such belief/commitment seriously and makes narrative kibble out of them. Pack in some whizz-bang space battles, Machiavellian politicking, and romance, and I'll cheerfully marathon entire seasons at once. I'm a little over halfway through the series now, and I really hope they can sustain the altitude ...

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

What was the other series that had such a huge fan following, that had the "Save ____" (series)? I wanted to see that one, too.