Snow Day!

Last night we didn't go to the Runcible Spoon (as we do most Tuesdays) because there had been snow and there was a lot of slush on the roads.

This morning I received this email:

Indiana University's Bloomington campus is closed until noon today (Jan. 28) because of icy roads creating hazardous travel conditions. A decision on whether to reopen after 12:00 p.m. will be made late in the morning based on updated road conditions.

Here's why:That's the view from our bedroom window.


That's the carpark of our building.

And this is Fess Ave facing north, the way I walk to get to campus.

A new record - the most snow I've ever seen in one place.

Addendum - Noon
Classes have been cancelled for the whole day. I just received an automated phone call explaining that the only people expected to turn up are those whose jobs involve moving snow or cooking in the residence halls. Even then, it's only if they're able to make it.

Even more surprising, Monroe county has declared a snow emergency! Only essential emergency and public safety travel is permitted. Luckily we have enough food for a few days.

Bitching about the weather again

A week or so ago we had a record cold snap - the record broken was "the coldest it's been in Bloomington since I moved here": And it's not just that it hits a low overnight, that -21˙ above was after 9 a.m., the lowest temperature recorded that day was -23˙C!

And it wasn't much warmer in the middle of the day, when the wind-chill took it down to -28!

And now I'm having students ask if I'm going to cancel class because there's a winter storm forecast. They're predicting a lot of snow!It's the ice I really hate; you can walk on snow ok but when the asphalt get icy you just slip straight over.

Happy Birthday Rabbie Burns!

Robert Burns was born 250 years ago today,

Last night Cindy and I went to a Burns supper where we ate haggis, drank scotch and heard some poetry. I was asked to give a speech "long-winded enough to remind the guests that this isn't the office Christmas party, yet not so long as to induce cramping, dry-mouth, or ringing in the ears". This gave me a good excuse to wear the Henderson tartan tie I bought in Edinburgh last summer.

It was a good night. The haggis was surprisingly edible; there was enough oatmeal and the meat was cut finely enough that it didn't feel too offally.

Back

We arrived back in Bloomington without incident. We made all our flights, the only delay was the flight from Chicago to Indy. I had phone the friend who was picking us up to tell him we were running on time, then United promptly made a liar out of me, forcing him to wait for us for an hour.

A Literary Meme

I've been tagged by Lara.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog. The premise of this exercise is that the (American) National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare. Well, quite a few during and since high school. No one needs to read them all!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams. The first one was hilarious, the second quite amusing, but the third just got too silly.
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens..
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis. Wait, wasn't #33 the whole Narnia series?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare. But #14 asked us if we'd read his complete works!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I'm not going to tag anyone. Most people I know are too lazy with their blogs. But if you want to do it, knock yourself out.