Onward!

While I feel the idea of naming winter storms is somewhat peculiar, the fact remains that what The Weather Channel has deemed as “Brutus” is moving through my area. So far, I can’t say there’s much snow as a result. I heard someone say five inches worth, but I’d say maybe two at best. There’s an outstanding prediction that tomorrow we’ll get a bunch more.

The whole idea of naming the storms seems like fear mongering to me, but I have to ask - we name hurricanes, so is that also fear mongering? There’s a central authority for tropical storms and hurricanes that handles this task. There is no such authority for winter weather; the Weather Channel has acted unilaterally, as far as I know. They say it’s because a named storm is easier to talk about and the name helps raise awareness. I was aware a storm was coming; the name didn’t help my awareness.

Just seems silly. I haven’t gone looking to see if other weather outlets have adopted the naming idea or not.

But that’s next week. (REALLY. NEXT WEEK. REALLY REALLY!) And beyond next week, I can’t give you promises, aside from the promise that I’m still working on this when I can.

This week is Part 14.

I’d really like to do something here on the front page more often, but I never know what to say. I hate to moan and complain about not having the time to do any writing; it’s old news by now, and you don’t want to hear it anyway. What I will say is that I’m still managing to hang onto a 4.0 GPA in my return to college, and I’ve been accepted into a 4-year school once I finish my 2-year degrees this December. I didn’t expect to be on this path; it’s strange the places life takes you.

The summer camp job was great fun, but it was a lot of work. We started the season understaffed and everyone helped cover other open spots. The kitchen was short several dishwashers, and the Trading Post (the store) lacked a full time manager. We did find someone for the last three weeks who was absolutely awesome and I hope we can convince her to come back next year. Her future fiancé took over program duties at the cub resident camp and did a great job, too. They, sadly, have their own camp to run.

Classes have been going well, but there’s still a lot of work left to do and six weeks left to cram it all into. At this moment I need to finish researching a speech ‘to inform,’ complete an economics research paper, do some book work for a visual arts class, knock out two accounting assignments, and assist in some grading of assignments. In addition to this, I need to make time to work at the ski park. We’ll have snow any day now and there’s still setting up to do.

On the bright side, I have another two chapters mostly done, aside from some light editing. I hope to get the next piece up by the end of this week. See you then.

Oops. I guess I gave it to someone else. I suppose you’ll just have to settle for a piece of Awakening, Part 11.

Back soon <3

I do however manage to tweet from time to time, as it seems to be a little more free form and quicker than sitting down and writing out a blog post. @bluevulpine

This year, I took a position at a summer camp as their business manager. While I have been looking at business management/education as a potential field of interest in my return to college, I’ve so far not taken much in the line of actual business management. Even so, I was offered the position - with little idea of what exactly I’d be doing aside from a basic explanation over the phone during the interview.

We’ve just finished our fourth week of scouts in camp. I now have a far better handle on what I’m doing - the first week, I was in the office nearly every night until 2am trying to make sure I had things right. Not quite so late, now… Generally 10pm or so. Still, it’s generally a 12-14 hour day in the office. I have Wednesday night and most of Saturday off, but my mental state is depleted enough by these points that I can’t concentrate on anything in fine detail.

As such, I haven’t gotten any more writing done. At this point I expect I won’t have anything new until August.

Sorry for the delay, but thanks for sticking around.

For my Desktop Publishing final project, among other requirements, I needed to create a ‘menu or program.’ I wound up making a wedding program for a nice couple I know. The tentative date for the wedding is sometime in 2048. I’ll get photos of the printed version, as the PDF in this case just doesn’t show off how nice the end result turned out. (Although, I admit, I made a rookie mistake on it.)

Spring has sprung here at the lake; the ice went off about a week ago and nearly carried off our dock, deck, and my propane grill. So, I went wading in 34ºF water (with rubber waders, thankfully, but it was still cold) and tied ropes to everything before it could escape too far into the lake to save. No worries—the next day, the wind shifted, and pushed the dock back to the shoreline retaining wall… and right on through it.

In the meantime, we had so much moisture stored in the snowpack that everything’s running over. There was (and in some places still is) flooding all over the state. Mother’s house in the city a few hours away decided this would be an excellent year to leak water into the basement. It’s on a hill, so it’s not from a river or anything. No broken pipes either, and no backing up from the sewer; no, Nature just decided to open a natural spring up underneath the concrete floor of the basement and it’s leeching in as fast as she can suck it out. She’s removed something on par of 500-600 gallons of water in the last week, 8 gallons at a time, using a shopvac. I wish Mr. Mike Holmes did stateside work.

The barge still isn’t on the lake, sadly; with the water content of the ground as it is, we can’t get a trailer to where it’s parked so we can load it. We’ve now had a couple of sunny days over the weekend, and I’m hopeful (but only just) that we might make some progress on Monday toward that goal.

I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.