Tag Archives: cold

The Guy Who Came In From the Cold

Posted on by Standard

The weather over the last few weeks has been obnoxiously brutal. I am not a cold-weather person. I do not mind the serenity of a snowstorm, but I certainly don’t want a foot of that stuff, much less sleet and ice.

Going out to shovel the snow this month was unpleasant. I went out after the first storm hit and cleared the front and back steps and made a path along the walkway. I cleared out the driveway as best as I could. But the heaviness of the snow and the nasty 30 mph wind just made me stop.

The problem with this methodology is that you feel frustrated during the entire process. You know that more snow is coming. You know it’s going to be garbage out. But, you also know you need access in and out in case of an emergency.

So with this thinking in my noggin, my dumb ass went out and did some shoveling. It wasn’t all bad. I did it in moderation, and the crisp air was nice when the wind wasn’t whirling. Eventually, I called it a day and went inside to a cup of tea.

I didn’t do my radio show that night, opting instead, to run a prerecorded program from the KDHX archives. I hate missing shows. When it happens,I get this empty feeling in the gut, an unsatisfied fix. Anyway, staying in was the prudent thing to do.

The next morning saw the full force, the big show. All of the weather folks said we were going to get snow, and they were right. It started light and lasted over 12 hours. It was wet, heavy, and compact snow, over a few inches of ice.

I got up that morning and did another go-round with the shovel. It was a pretty crappy endeavor. There was just too much. It was the biggest snowstorm here since 1982 and the second-biggest since 1912.

When it all stopped that early evening I went out, and with the help of a few neighbors, got the driveway, stairs, and entryways done. I also cleared off the sidewalk. While I was outside I could not help but think how nuts you would have to be to live in a climate like that for a long time.

I hate winter. I hope this is the bloody end of the snow for this year. I feel bad for parents that have little mongrels running around sugared up and excited to go out and play in the stuff. I also hate how the entire city freaks out and decides to bum rush the grocery stores and gas stations. It is frightening that people think they need to shop like they are going on a safari or something just because there is a snowstorm coming.

Having no desire to go outside, I spent four days inside doing projects, reading, and watching movies. For someone who has been indoors most of the last two years, being inside because of a winter storm is a piece of cake. It’s not a hard decision really, it’s cold, it’s icy, you cannot see well, and the wind is beastly.

On the positive side, I got a respite from dealing with the public. These days you aren’t sure what to expect when you go out into the world. While there are a lot of kind and empathetic people, there also are morons who deserve the opprobrium heaped on him. Especially selfish people who are oblivious to the world and think everything is about them. Selfish people who seem oblivious to the world, instead of thinking everything is all about them.

While winter storms are an inconvenient disruption, they are also a chance to slow things down, get some projects done and catch up on books, movies, TV, etc.

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I have been hearing more and more about Iceland over the last few years. I worked with a guy who went there often for music festivals, and another friend of mine was there a few times and loved it. Iceland also has become a more frequent subject of travel shows in recent years.

I am also curious about it because I listen to loads of bands from there. There is a musical vibe happening there, and it is so much deeper than Sigur Ros or Bjork.

This, along with my interest in history, led me to How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island by Egill Bjarnson. A journalist based in Reykjavík, who has championed his country in several publications over the years, Bjarnson has written a crisp book about the country he loves.

While I have read books about the Vikings over the years, I had not thought about Erik the Red or Leif Erikson since grade school. When you are young, their exploits capture the imagination. When you read about them as an adult, you quickly discover that Erik the Red was an exiled murderer and Erikson was a religious zealot.

Expanding his narrative to include Greenland and Northern Canada, Bjarnson’s chronicle of the country’s founding is fascinating stuff. Later, he moves on to Iceland’s role in the contemporary world. From creating natural energy to serving as a neutral arbiter in world affairs. Overall, this is a pretty compelling read.

Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese writer, actress, model, and countercultural icon. Her life came to a tragic end in 1986 after she committed suicide. During the last decade of her life, she produced an influential body of radical, punky, and groundbreaking fiction that is only now being discovered by English readers.

Terminal Boredom features an intriguing collection of stories that use gender roles, despair, and isolation as common themes. Translated into English for the first time, there are some great sci-fi elements to her work that are a throwback to some of the best SF of the 70s.

Each of the seven stories featured combines her black humor, sense of irony, and dystopian unease with clever storytelling that never rests on solid ground.

I watched a film from 1961 called The Hoodlum Priest. Filmed on location in St. Louis, it was interesting to note the different settings in the film. The movie is based on the true-life story of Charles, “Dismas” Clark, a Jesuit priest who helped the recently incarcerated find a new life.

The biggest takeaway I got from the movie was that there was a seriously seedy underbelly going on in the city back then. There were a lot of slums, underdeveloped areas, and forlorn residents.

Don Murray and Keir Dullea star in it. Murray played it serious in an intense performance. Dullea was pretty good in his first feature film.

The St. Louis of 1961 does not seem very appealing. Now I know why my mom hated moving here so much.

At the moment there are a lot of great bands coing out of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay area. there’s a lot happening there, and Artsick is at the center of it.

Hailing from Oakland, the band featues Christina Riley of Burnt Palms, bassist Donna McMean from Lunchbox, and drummer Mario Hernandez from Kids on A Crime Spree. energetic and raw,

As a whole, Fingers Crossed is fine collection of eleven songs steeped in power pop melodies and post-punk snarling.

On Fingers Crossed, released via Slumberland Records, the trio makes music that is spirited, and lively, resulting in a slick debut filled with catchy songs and clever melodies.

The Olympics are on. I have not seen as much of it as I would have liked. But the curling and speed skating have been great. The luge, skeleton, and bobsledding have also been competitive.

I watched the biathlon the other day. I still don’t get it. It just seems like a lot of work. Those rifles have to be heavy, and I am sure the athletes are exhausted after finishing.

I also am pretty sure that those kids who do the half-pipe and snowboarding are probably as annoying as the local skateboard kids in my neighborhood.

A few weeks ago saw John Adams conduct the St. Louis Symphony. he debuted a new work and selected a program of exceptional contemporary works. The SLSO has done a great job with social distancing, masking, and keeping people safe. They also got a rad new filtration system.

I have also seen some plays. Most of the smaller companies here are doing a great job of keeping people safe. I saw The Prom at The Fox and was a bit nervous by the volume of people and the great swarm of people who didn’t cover their noses.

In appliance news, I cleared out some calcium from the kitchen sink faucet. The UV sanitizer I got during the pandemic finally crapped out. It served me well.

The biggest domestic hassle was having a hinge snap on one of the kitchen cabinet doors. I jumped online to get a replacement and quickly discovered it had been discontinued. After more digging, I found one from a specialty seller and am hopefully good to go.

I also got some new sneakers for the first time in over two years. Going to a shoe store right now is pretty weird.

That should do it for now. After a slight warmup, it is cold again. People are still weird though. Much more than usual.

Entropy

Posted on by Standard

Note: I wrote this abut a month ago when it was really, really, cold out. I had forgotten that I had this as a draft.

Everything is falling apart. I just finished spending 45 minutes getting the internet back online. I am not sure if it was a network outage or some weird thing on my end. But I do know that I trouble shooted the daylights out of my modem and router and finally got it working. It was incredibly frustrating.

I hate talking to service companies and (f)utility companies. They never really help and you always end up either shouting at them or trying to bang your head against the wall getting them to understand you.

If that wasn’t bad enough there was about a two week stretch last month (February) of really, really bad cold weather. There was ice and snow and subzero cold. St. Louis in winter is no fun anyway, but this was a particularly nasty stretch of weather. in fact, it was the longest cold spell with single digits temperatures since the 1940s.

For about 16 days it was in the teens at its warmest with wind chills between -15 and -25. It was no fun. Early , I toughed it out and planned things out to minimize exposure. After the first snow stopped, however, I went ahead and shoveled the back steps, driveway and front entryway. Thankfully, it was the kind of snow where you could just sweep it away.

It was like sweeping inside a meat cooler. I set my phone alarm for 30 minutes so I would not be out very long. It was 1 degree out and a -8 windchill. Ick!

It was like seriously Jack London and Ernest Shackleton cold. It was not a time to play around. I didn’t even have a Tauntaun. However, I did wear layers and paced myself. I got a lot of it cleared off in pretty decent time. Having finished that, I threw down some salt because it was supposed to snow two more times over the coming days and all the smart people from the weather bureau said it would help keep freezing down when the next snow hit.

It did snow again and boy were they right about throwing salt of gritty stuff on the ground.

Next, I moved the trashcan and recycle bin next to the back stairs, so it was right outside the back stairs so all I would need to do is open the back door and go a few steps to unload recycling and trash. My motivation for this was to avoid going outside again for a long period of time. I am glad I did this because I didn’t leave home for six days. I bundled up and dropped stuff in bins twice but I was only outside for, at most, maybe a minute or two.

The entire time this was happening I was worried about the pipes freezing. There is no-one living on the second floor which meant that no one was running a tap lightly at night to keep things from freezing. Luckily everything held.

It was Pushkin novel cold outside.

With regards to warmth, plugging in heaters and using every available blanket to bundle up was fun. Not really. Although things were not too cold inside, it got a bit rough when the winds picked up. But there was whiskey, hot tea and hot chocolate for that.

Having weathered that fiasco the drama of the water heater unfolded. There was no warm water for nearly a week. The pilot light just would not stay lit. A guy game to fix it and installed a new thermometer in it and things got warm for a few hours. But then it was cold again. This was the saga. Light pilot light, have warm water for a short duration and then it was cold again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It went on forever, almost as long as the Battle of Iwo Jima. There also was water leaking for the tank into the drain in the basement.

So the back and forth of getting my property manager to fix this went on and then they fixed it. When they sorted it out it was if the Red Sea had parted or something. It was insanely frustrating.

Then there was the entropy in the outside world. People were losing their goddamn minds. They couldn’t get vaccinated. They chose not to get vaccinated. They didn’t eat the red M&M’s. They insisted on going out maskless. They watched Friends. Civilization was ending.

If that wasn’t enough my freelance client spent a lot of time explaining to me that the Pope was a robot. Normally I would have cut my losses and run but she was paying me and the money was a nice supplement to the work income I was losing because the store was closed.

These kind of failures are emblematic of modern times. Things break, fall apart or need to be disassembled and then reassembled until they are in working order. In the end it all get sorted. Unless you need a vaccine in Missouri, then you are just screwed.

To call the ineptitude and disorganization around Missouri’s distribution of Covid vaccines Stalinist would be a compliment. This kind of total bureaucracy mixed with an unwavering sense of malice is utterly vile. The lack of compassion and disinterest in planning is simply inexcusable in our world. It is all infuriating.

On the plus side, I did get finally get my first shot. I only had to register at 20 (yes 20!) places before getting lucky. I even dug out the map of the state so I could find all these hick towns in the region that got more vials of vaccine than they had residents.