snow day, last day, final pants

Yesterday was supposed to be a blizzardy mess, and I was ready for it. I had nothing calling me to campus. I had milk in the fridge. I had a pile of ingredients and supplies for Christmas present-making and assembly. I filled out final-grade sheets to the sounds of Lenny Briscoe.

And yet yesterday was not a blizzardy mess. It was so decent out at 3 p.m., for example, that I took the dog for a walk. The walk ended up resembling a canine death march, or so Truman would have you believe--for four miles, he lagged behind me to the point that I had to pull him down the snooshy sidewalks, and one car honked at what they thought was a clear case of animal cruelty--but no blizzard. Cold. Windy. Blizzardless.

Lots of stupid Blizzard puns on the Face, though. FIRST TIME WAS FUNNY. EIGHTH TIME, NOT SO MUCH.

Instead, the blizzard came this morning. The drive out to campus was slippery. On my way to my first class, I fell. Twice. All day long I fielded e-mails from students, all of which can be summarized thusly:

Hi prof,

I dont think I'll be making it to class today because i have a tiny little car that is bad/the roads are really bad/the weather is bad. I realize that I have many absences already so if you require my presence please let me know and I will try to drive out to school. Let me know as soon as you can though because based on the road conditions it will take me quite a while to get there so I would need to leave as soon as I can if I really, really have to come in.

Sigh.

The snow continued to fall through the morning and early afternoon. And then, as my second class of the day was ending, one of my IS/CS majors (I have roughly eighty-five) announced that the campus was going to close.

According to Twitter, I said, we are very much still open.

Yeah, he said, I saw that too. But my buddy, who works in IT, just IMed me that they got the word that we're closing, and they get it first because they have to e-mail everyone and change the Web site. So pretty soon you should get a text alert, if you're signed up to get the text alerts.

The revolution will be Tweeted.

And so my last class of the day was canceled. Instead, we drove the slippery roads home. I have a bag full of grade sheets and a new pair of final pants, featuring fleecy pockets and a drawstring. At the end of the number crunching and the presentations, I will get onto a plane and fly to Atlanta, where my brother has already mapped us a weekend of southern Christmas, including something at the Fox on Saturday night and post-midnight waffles. Then we'll roadtrip up to Buffalo together, where I will sit in front of the fire and drink bourbon. Then back here for the new year. Then lather, rinse, repeat.