The Peacock's Feathers

I don't know what possessed me, but I took a look at houses in Lowell on Zillow tonight.

I found one rather nice house in my price range. Then checked the map, and it's withing smelling distance of the town sewage plant. Which always smells rather pungent when I drive by, and is strong enough in the summer that I always close my car windows when I pass it. I can smell it just writing about it. No, I do not want to buy a house in a one block radius of that stench.

I found another home that looked nice, a 1950s vintage ranch. It's within a block of U Mass Lowell, so too close to campus to be a quiet neighborhood. I'm a good four miles away, and I'm still too close to campus.

And I looked at a townhome. Same size as my condo, but it's nice and sunny because it's not underground. And the neighbors would be on either side of me, not over my head. And I would have access to a tiny back deck and a backyard. But it costs three times what I paid for my condo. For basically getting some sunlight and a little bit of grass with the same square footage.

* le sigh *

I don't know why I bothered looking.

Ryan Hall Y’all is forecasting 14 - 19 inches of snow for Boston over Sunday through Monday.

He's still predicting a foot of snow for my hometown of Lexington, KY. That's pretty historic snow for them, we had 15 inches during the Blizzard of 1978 (for context, that's the entire winter's worth of snowfall in a single storm...). And really that storm was the only time I remember getting more than an inch when I lived in KY. Interestingly, when I googled it looks like climate change has been bringing more snow to Lexington than we got when I was a kid.

Ryan Hall Y’all is forecasting 16 inches of snow for Lowell over Sunday through Monday.

Weather Underground is forecasting 14 inches of snow for Lowell over Sunday through Monday.

Still busy at work. I had three hours of meetings today before lunch. And we had a patch release today, so I had two sets of Release Notes to get updated and published. I also did the first Helm Charts release in a month to clear out the backlog (19!) of updates we’ve had in the past month. And then, because we had had the patch release, I did another Helm Charts release to update the software version in the charts. Between catching up on Slack and my inbox, and another meeting in the evening, that kept me busy all day.

*****

There was a lot of talk about the weather at work today. One of my coworkers shared a video to the "Location - USA” Slack channel from his favorite online meteorologist. (a guy out of Pikeville, KY who goes by Ryan Hall Y’all) I haven’t watched a meteorologist in *yoinks*, but I watched his forecast. He’s talking about a historic storm, with an ice storm stretching across Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee that could drop up to an INCH of ice, depending on where the storm ends up hitting. And then, after the ice storm takes out trees and possibly takes out power, the temps are going to drop into the negative numbers. He’s warning people to prepare for multiple days without power. With temperatures below zero.

And FEMA probably will not come to help these people. This could get really bad.

Depending on the model, he’s talking about 12 - 16 inches of snow in Boston. New York City could get 18 inches. Philly could get 19 inches. My hometown of Lexington, KY could get a foot of snow!

*****

Over in the docs team Slack channel, one of my coworkers in Texas quipped that he was off to panic buy! BBIAB. At the end of a pretty lengthy thread with various coworkers in various parts of the country talking about what they were doing or not doing to prepare for the storm, we ended with this exchange:

Johnny “Now y'all got me starting to believe the hype. I may have to head to the book store after work and stock up for the storm.”

Fiona “I like that your version of stocking up for an ice storm is to get more books”

*****
Despite the fact that we just talked on Monday, Mom called me again tonight.

She’d heard a story on NPR about An Unlikely Story Bookstore in Plainville MA, which is owned by the guy who wrote Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And she thought it might be a nice place to check out if I wanted to take a roadtrip some weekend.

And she also mentioned that home prices in Plainville are very reasonable.

Because of course she did.

*****
Speaking of weather… Market Day at BIrka is this weekend. Right now the forecast is a high of 11 degrees. But a friend shared a screenshot on FB of the wind chill forecast, and it might be as bad as “feels like” -25 to -30 degrees at 8:00 on Saturday morning. If the wind chill is that bad, I may bail on Birka and stay home. I can dress for cold weather, but wind chills that far below zero are frickin dangerous.