Traction Control

To start this off on a good note, I've been on a binge of movies starring Pierce Brosnan this weekend: "The Laws of Attraction," "The Thomas Crown Affair," and a string of Bond films. I'm happy to report that the Halloween boxset and the Omen boxset have finished, putting my sinister little collection somewhere in the neighborhood of 750. Sabrina is sleeping on my chest and purring like a chainsaw. How she manages to rest her chin on her back paws astounds me. That would be like me sleeping comfortably with my nose pressed to my ankles.

We had a much-welcomed Snow Day today. I used it to catch up on my Adger reading and play around with Linux distributions at home. It was nice to hang around the house, not really doing anything, wearing a baggy pair of sweatpants and a 12 year old Superman shirt full of holes.

The snow was very pretty, but my motorcycle was buried under about six or seven inches of snow, which today, turned into slush, which tonight has frozen into a layer of ice... This worries me. Such a thing used to happen in Northern VA when I lived there: it would snow like crazy, get juuuust warm enough to turn it into slush, and the following night (a night like tonight) it would drop down to 20F and turn the roads into a lovely, shimmering, slippery pane of glass. We used to call weather instances like this "ice-overs."

It's 27F now. They're putting it at 21F by 5-6am. Grrr...

I am supposed to be at the lab for a staff meeting at 11am. I'm certainly NOT going in on my motorcycle. Ignoring the fact that the engine is encased in a block of ice right now, I'm not going out onto an icey road with only two wheels of traction. In a car, if one wheel loses traction, you've got three others to keep hold of the road. If you lose one wheel of traction on a bike, you're SOL. You might as well be riding a unicycle at 35mph.

It would thrill me beyond belief if school was cancelled again tomorrow, or if the staff meeting was rescheduled. My evil master plan to camp out in the lab this weekend and work was derailed by the inclement weather. Saturday turned into a laundry/housecleaning day. If I had known it was gonna snow, I would have made THAT the lab day and turned Sunday and Monday into the laundry/housecleaning days. So I don't have half the things done I wanted to get done in time for the staff meeting, ESPECIALLY considering the midterms and massive amount of homework due last week.

So I don't wanna get up tomorrow. I'm going to limp my way in to campus in the Tahoe and hopefully find a parking spot at a meter that I can keep feeding during the day. That means I'm going to need a bunch of quarters... Despite my better judgement, I'll drag myself in tomorrow, feeding quarters to the downtown Athens meter-maids (aka, the Yellow Envelope Parking Nazis).

I may try to go in early, driving slowly, and give myself a couple hours to get the tape drive working on the RHEL machine in the lab, but I doubt it.

My sleep schedule has been pretty out of whack recently. I don't have an explanation. I'm not writhing in mental turmoil. I'm not doing anything constructive. I'm tired, just sleepless. Something's up. I can feel it. What's up, I have no idea. I described it before as feeling a great disturbance in the Force. I've been up later and later, sleeping 2 or 3 hours a night, but always managing to get up and get to class on time. Midterms had an affect obviously, but it's been going on longer than that. That's how Satuday turned into a house-day: I went to bed semi-early Friday night and slept until 3pm. That didn't help.

Generally, when it comes to sleep, I'm the master of my own destiny. I've kept my Mt Dew and coffee in-take regulated so that I can sleep when I need to and so I can stay up when I need to. The system is broken right now, however. Gotta get a grip.