My governor has shut down public transit for tomorrow, which means no work for me. Although I do have a vision of making the two mile hike over the Longfellow Bridge, pretending to be Eliza crossing the ice, or Matthew Henson, or maybe one of the Yeti who might be poking their snouts into my 2014 unfinished WriMo, I probably wouldn’t end up being paid anyway. We have a policy of being closed when the Boston public schools are, which is a pain in the sheep because the Boston public schools are wussies. Last month when we had a cold snap they closed down, which at least gave me a *quiet* day here at home, as the Cambridge schools laughed and told the kiddies to pile on another sweater–as well they should.
But tomorrow there’s no arguing from me, because we’re SUPPOSEDLY getting up to 30 inches by Wednesday morning. Even the new boots Sunny gave me this past weekend ain’t gonna cut it. I’m just hoping we’re dug out and back to quasi-normal by Wednesday, because we had two weeks of enforced “vacation” cutting into the budget this month as it is. Grrrr. I had always assumed that this was a way of balancing the department budget, but was told when I complained to the leadership committee that it was “just tradition” because “peers don’t ever take breaks.” Until my as-unwhiny-as-possible email, it apparently hadn’t really sunk in that “peers don’t really like being forced to eat ramen noodles,” and now for 2015 it’ll be only one week break. Yay!
But it is what it is, and with both spawn working, we’re hanging in there, doing much better than we have in the past, and much better than the people I serve, so I can’t really complain. (Much.) So much for blizzard, so much for paychecks, and on to the sloth!
Snow days have an American magic about them, because even the vaunted Protestant Work Ethic has to bow before Nature’s divine tantrum. I suspect we’re really supposed to clean out that closet we’ve been ignoring, but instead everybody treats it like a free Saturday, when we can’t even do errands because everything is closed. (Sort of like Christmas, only the Chinese restaurants may not make it either.) We sleep in, we read trash (which is all I ever read anyway, even though my trash has mellowed for a century or so), we eat whatever we find in our larders. (This depends on when we got to the store the night before and whether or not we staggered home in a daze, clutching only the last battered packet of toilet paper and half a box of butter.)
I myself will be doing at least some work, as I have a couple hours of graphics stuff piled up and I haven’t entirely forgotten the paycheck–and there’s always *shudder* query letters and Real Writing–unless, of course, the power goes out. But I have charged and loaded up my Kindle accordingly, and can always do the next stage of dollhouse repair, until it gets dark at teatime. Then all bets are off, and I don’t know what will happen. We might even play a board game by candlelight–at least until the cold drives us to huddle under our blankets in defeat. I’m almost looking forward to it, because it always makes our usual impoverished prosperity so shiny and valuable by contrast.
All in all, I’m a lucky girl. Even if Amaterasu the ferret did drag the insoles out of my new boots.
Update: Boss called and informed me that Boston schools are closed Wednesday too. Sigh.
