Blow Ye Winds, Blow

Apparently our trip up north was very well timed, since we made it home on dry roads with only a minor blip in traffic near Madison. There’s always traffic around Madison. It was an easy drive.

This would not have been the case had we tried it today. Likely would not be the case tomorrow either.

Most of Wisconsin is shut down right now, and when Wisconsin shuts down because of a winter storm you know it’s bad. When they close the bars then shit has definitely gotten real.

The state Department of Transportation has this nice service where if you go to their website you can see a map of travel conditions. The entire northern half of the state is outlined in black and listed as “Stay the hell off the roads you simpletons! Your 4-wheel-drive Compensator will not help you!  We’re not sending people to rescue you! Maybe Tuesday we’ll send out retrieval parties! Morons.” I’m sure if they thought they could get away with it there would be skull-and-crossbones graphics as well, and possibly little hand emojis flipping you off for even thinking about driving, but they’re doing what they can to get the message across.

The interstate highway that we took to drive home on Friday was shut down in both directions at 11am today. The traffic camera images all looked like closeups of sheep.

Down here in Wisconsin’s banana belt it has rained incessantly since about mid-morning and you have to appreciate the fact that you don’t have to shovel rain. The winds are fierce, the ground is saturated, and the main storm has started to sag southward so our potential overnight snowfall has been raised from one to four inches (2.5-10cm) to eight to twelve inches (20-30cm). This will be on top of all the rain, which will have frozen into sheets of ice at some inconvenient point in order to provide just THAT MUCH MORE EXCITEMENT for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not looking good for leaving the house is what I’m getting at here. All of the local school districts have already announced that they’re closed. As for Home Campus, we usually wait to make that call. Instructors can cancel their own classes without too much bother and staff can make the choice to stay home on their own, but to close the entire campus officially triggers a wave of bureaucracy that the people in charge try to avoid if at all possible. So we’ll see.

I don’t have any classes or student appointments tomorrow, but I do have to be part of two different candidate interviews for positions where we’re hiring and I’m not sure how much of that is actually going to happen. Perhaps there will be Zoom. I’m not the one making the decisions, so I’m sure I will be told at some point.

At the moment I’m just sitting in my little office, surrounded by books, listening to the rain lash against the windows. I got the grocery shopping done yesterday and none of today’s plans involved putting on shoes. There’s corned beef simmering on the stove, since Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day and nobody has time to simmer corned beef on a workday. It smells good.

So we will hunker down and be glad for our snug oasis in the middle of the storm.