In which the protagonist secures a library card

Things have been pretty busy lately, but I'm still around. Since last post I've survived the first prospective grad student visiting weekend, midterms, and the first half of Spring Break. I still need to finish my taxes, jump start my car, and, tomorrow, it's supposed to snow half a foot. Gah.

Anyway, yesterday I went to get a library card for the Madison Public Library. It was my first excursion into the central branch of the library, which is amusing because it's immediately next to the building where I work downtown and I've walked past it hundreds of times since I got here. Anyway, a cool thing about Madison is that it's a large enough city to have several library branches and in addition it's part of a 7-county group of libraries so I can request almost as many books as I'd be able to get from the university libraries. They also have lots of DVDs and many copies of the popular ones. So, for example I expected it to take several days or a week for me to get the first disc of Firefly episodes, because I was the fourth person requesting it, but it showed up for me to collect within 24 hours of my request. w00t.

More later, perhaps, unless I'm busy watching movies. :-)

Warmth! Sunshine! w00t!

Last week it was sunny every day, and we got less than one inch of snow in total. Happiness! Presently, it is 43 degrees (sadly not sunny anymore, although it was this morning), and for the next week highs should be in the mid-to-upper twenties. I've never been this ready for spring to start. Now that there are only 13" of snow left on the ground in most places, if the current weather trend continues, I'll be able to see the grass again in about two months. :-D

Edited: According to the NWS, our current snow depth is not 8", which I had estimated, but 13"

In which the protagonist, accepting that it will never improve, gives up on complaining about the weather

...except to say that she's betting that she will have shoveled more than 5' of snow this winter (having left some of it to housemates) when all is said and done, and she's not happy about it.

Anyway, as of today I am officially registered to vote in the state of WI. However, I did *not* register with any particular party, because WI doesn't require one to (actually, I probably would have, but I didn't see the option on the registration form and I wanted to leave the polling place as soon as possible). My polling place is in the moderately sketchy area that I go half a mile out of my way to avoid when walking home from work at night... but whatever. WI uses paper ballots, which confuse me mightily. I neglected to study the layout and determine whether there was a write-in option anywhere (not that I foresee wanting to vote for persons not on the ballot, but these things are good to know).

Earlier this evening, I was amused that CNN called WI for McCain before any results were officially in, and that they waited all of 20 minutes before calling it for Obama. w00t. This makes me optimistic that I have possibly voted for the winner of a national election for the first time (since my 2004 choices for presidential nominee (Dean) and President (Kerry) both lost).

Obama in Madison

The following speech was given at the Kohl Center (I was all the way up in the nosebleed section).

More snow; the descent into madness continues

Another foot today. We're at 7' total since the beginning of December (the normal amount is about 2'). WTF? I miss being able to see the ground. I also miss the sun, as it tends to be cloudy while it's snowing every day (and on the special occasions when the sun does come out for whole hours at a time it's usually because the temperature have dropped below 10 degrees).

I had to trudge home from the downtown office over more than a mile of unshoveled sidewalks and several snowdrifts up to my knees. Adding insult to injury, while I was walking, I was passed by a bus. Then five minutes later I was passed by another bus on the same line, which is completely wrong. They're supposed to run every half-hour and there were not supposed to be any around the time I left the office (hence my decision to walk). I hate infrequent, scheduled public transportation - it's f*ing useless when the weather is crappy and it gets off schedule (which, of course is the only time I'd want to use it).

I got home to find our walks in need of shoveling for the third time since this morning (I shoveled once in the morning and one of my roomies redid them during the day... I also think someone may have shoveled last night). The snow mountain in front of the house is now taller than me. And it's spawned a second snow mountain at the end of the driveway, which is also about my height. So any future snow will have to be carried halfway down the block so I don't hurt myself trying to fling it over the top of a 5'6" pile.

Spring can't come too soon (although someone pointed out that around here snow is not unheard of in May).

The Qual, an icequake, and other disturbances

I took the qualifying exam last weekend, and got my score today. I think it was a remarkably good score considering that it was a six-hour test on any/all of undergraduate physics with no formula sheet. So I will be most likely be allowed to remain in WI for another 4 winters or until the weather kills me. Which it continues to try to do. For example, with the wildly fluctuating temperatures (from a sunny tropical 40F to -10F and then back to the reasonable low 20's in the last three days) the lake north of campus apparently had enough and a bunch of ice shifted, shaking several campus buildings (including mine) enough to cause calls to security/facilities. As far as I know it didn't actually damage anything - but still. The weather is insane.

Also, attempting to start my car in the ridiculous cold apparently killed the battery, so it still doesn't start and I don't have time to deal with getting it jumped. Great. Or, perhaps I do have time to get it jumped, but I foolishly spend it writing blog-rants. Whatever. In any case, though I am tired and cold and increasingly out of food that isn't milk, eggs, bread, peanut butter and jelly, or ramen, I'm in good spirits. But busy; blog posting will resume at some date TBD.

Cold

Whether being cold builds character I couldn't say. However, it is amazingly effective at building perspective and tolerance for cold. This morning, I went outside to try to start my car (all attempts were unsuccessful)*. For this adventure I wore long underwear under my usual jeans and tshirt, a winter hat, a hoodie (hood on), my jacket with its fleece liner (hood on). I was probably not in immediate danger of freezing, but I could still tell that it was pretty cold. It was about -9 F (wind chill: -27 F). However, a few hours later (temperature: -4 F, wind chill: -25 F) when I went outside without my jacket and with only one head covering to empty the recyclables can I was fine. I also suspect that I will be *happy* when the high temps go back to a balmy 15 F in a few days.

It will also be interesting to see what happens tonight when I will probably walk ~1.2 miles to go to a juggling show and then, depending on the bus schedule, walk home (unless I decide to go to a party downtown after the show... which will add alcohol and two additional miles of walking to the equation). If no one hears from me for a while, it may be safe to assume that my hypothermia-inducing stupidity has been removed from the gene pool (alternatively, I may be busy studying for quals).

*The Paul Simonmobile has another interesting problem also. Last time I took it out, a lot of water condensed on the insides of the windshield and windows... then it froze and it hasn't thawed since. So, if the car starts again before spring, I will probably need to scrape the *inside* of the windshield before I can actually go anywhere. W00T.