Biblical Proportions

Fall semester: day fifty-seven

Yeah, so there was another earthquake last night. 4.7, fairly light (I believe that was the magnitude of the very first one of the three, as well). I felt it, but barely. I probably would not have had I not been sitting at my desk again, as per the usual. This one was just a light tremor, but enough to make me notice.

That's three earthquakes, all of them in exactly the same spot in Oklahoma, since Friday. Three earthquakes in four days -- around the same time of night -- with numerous small aftershocks. I would not at all be surprised if one of these three things were to happen:

1.) I would not be surprised if another earthquake were to occur tonight roughly around the same magnitude or larger.

2.) I would not be surprised if Oklahoma is completely swallowed by the earth (and truthfully, would it really be such a loss?)

3.) And I would not be surprised if, in the next quake, a massive underground Godzilla-like monster climbs out of the earth and starts eating people there.

The original, somewhat more logical question I asked on Facebook was "What's next, Oklahoma? Volcanoes? Locusts?"

Former student (and now close friend) Jordan reminded me that quakes are not new to the midwest, obviously, but they are fairly rare -- but most of the ones out here center around the New Madrid fault in Missouri (by St. Louis). Not in Oklahoma, or, as we saw this past spring, in fucking Arkansas, of all places. Quakes with epicenters in Kansas are rare as well, but not unheard of. Hell, even my home state of West Virginia had to deal with quakes earlier this year.

My brother put forth the theory that perhaps Mother Earth is angry with us. I'm beginning to believe him.

Yesterday, on my day off, it rained and stormed violently for most of the day, and stuck around for today. This morning when I left the house at 6:45 to make the trek to campus, it was misting rain. This isn't a problem, as I've said before -- the Monte Carlo performs just fine in the rain, with the added bonus of the rain rinsing all of the road dust off my car and making the faded paint shine like new -- and I have new, high-end wiper blades I installed on the car myself this summer. Driving in rain is no big deal. I've done it hundreds of times in several different vehicles, from the ex-girlfriend's Contour and old Grand Am, as well as her mother's minivan, to my Monte Carlo now. I made the trip to school this morning and it stopped raining, so I figured that would be the end of it, as we weren't really supposed to get anything else today.

I was totally, absolutely wrong.

By 11, the beginning of my second class, it had begun raining again. Fairly hard. The wind whipped the rain into the kind of nasty, cold mist mixed with big drops that I absolutely haaaaate this time of year.

Let me be clear: I love rain; I love thunderstorms, really I do. But I love them when it's about 70-75 degrees outside. When it's 40 and the wind is blowing, it becomes a sheet of wet coldness that I want no part of, and will soak you to your bones. It, of course, does not help that Wichita's rainy season starts around mid-October and runs through early December, when all of it turns to ice and snow for three months.

But I'm getting to that.

Anyway.

So, after I taught my classes today, both of which I kept in the classroom the entire time -- today was "evaluations day," as well as the day they had a big assignment to turn in and a very long grammar/formatting/quoting lesson to sit through -- I walked outside around 12:20 to see that it was still coming down hard in a windy, wet sheet of everything I hate about fall. Great. And it was coming down harder than before, too. Double-great.

Yes, I know, first world problems. Anyway.

As it was getting much colder at that point (temperatures were dropping like a stone), I feared the changeover to ice and/or snow on my drive home this afternoon, putting me in a similar situation as I was a week ago on Wednesday night. It did not change over to snow or ice on my drive home, but I did notice something really interesting instead, and it's something one of my friends commented about on Facebook -- after this summer of almost no rain at all, it seems that people living in Kansas conveniently forgot how to drive in a rainstorm. So, going north on I-135 at 12:30 this afternoon to get back home, I'm following people going 60. In the fast lane. And not getting over to allow me to pass them. The speed limit is 75 for most of I-135. As I can and do drive safely in the rain, even at 75mph, and as I drive a 215hp sports car, following someone in the fast lane who's going 60 is fucking maddening. Especially when the misty, nasty wake from their car and tires is fucking up my vision no matter how fast I have the wipers running.

Mind you, however, I also know there's no cops on 135 during this time of day (and if there are, they can be seen quite easily from a distance, as between Wichita and Newton it's basically a straight line), and if the weather and visibility are good, I'll drive 90-95 the entire way home. Because that's what speed the Decepticon likes. She rattles between 70 and 80. Slower than that, she's good. Faster than that, she's good.

Anyway. So, I got home, safely, in this incredibly nasty-ass weather that nobody should ever like or want, and though I slept last night, the cold and rain was making me too tired to do anything else during the afternoon hours. I ended up curling up downstairs in bed and sleeping until around 10PM or so.

When I awoke, it was still raining, hard. And it was still cold. I came back upstairs, figuring I'd dick around on the computer for a few hours and see if I was tired enough to go back to bed before the morning, when I saw a status message a friend had posted.

It read, simply, "So the rain has now turned to snow."

I got up, walked to the living room window, and saw that it was still just rain here. I returned to my room and relayed that info.

No more than, oh, three or four minutes later, my news feed on Facebook is flooded with "It's snowing in Newton!" or similar messages.

So I got back up, walked to the living room window again, and...they were right. In that short amount of time, the rain had completely switched over to snow. Hard, heavy, wet snow. Again. But this time it was sticking to everything, including the grass, roads, and my car. Fuck. Really?

By the time the snow stopped coming down so hard (around 11PM or so) there was close to an inch on the ground at my house, and the grass was completely covered for a brief time. It then began to melt as soon as it came, from everywhere but the grass and my car. It is now 1AM, and as I write this the snow has completely melted off of everything, and the weather outside is now calm.

This can, of course, only be a good thing, as six hours from now I'll be making my trek back to campus. By then it should be warmer than it is now (currently a balmy 37 degrees) and it's supposed to get into the 50s this afternoon. And to think, I almost had to break out my famous grey trenchcoat, or the leather motorcycle jacket. Not yet, folks. But wait.

The rest of this week may go quietly for me, but the work is far from over. I once again have two novels to read this weekend, with the added bonus of two presentations I must create and prepare for (as I mentioned here previously). Neither will be too difficult to get through -- at least I hope not -- but it's still a considerable amount of work. Once those two presentations are out of the way I will just have the papers to write and finish (as well as the final exam to take in my Middle Eastern/Asian lit course) before all of my hard work is done for the semester. The presentations represent about half of what I have left to do for my classes, and as you know, I'll be writing/finishing the papers over Thanksgiving week. While there's a lot of work left, the remainder of fall semester should go quickly. The stars are falling into alignment, so to speak, and I can plot out everything that needs to be done and when. For once. This is, of course, a rare occasion for me.

As for my personal life? It's much the same. I'm still budgeting for survival, though the budget situation isn't as bad as I thought it would be at this point in the semester. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll scoot by just fine until I get the other half of my loan money for this year in the first week of January or so. I say "cautiously optimistic," really, because anything could happen between now and then. I also realize, though, that I won't be spending $30 a week on gasoline for about a month as well, as I won't have to make the trip back and forth for class every day.

I am greatly looking forward to the Winter Break, which for us starts shortly before my birthday (so, a little more than a month from now). While I will probably be cold and lonely as per the usual, I will at least be home all the time with no real responsibility to worry about or any place to be. I also have a stack of movies I purchased well before fall semester started (some of them even before the former girlfriend and I parted ways), and I intend to sit down on the couch in the living room, in the dark with my new LCD HDTV, and watch every single one of them without having to worry that I'm wasting time that could better be spent on homework, lesson plans, or reading. In addition to that, I also have two new (read: purchased months ago) Pokemon games that I haven't touched yet, games that I haven't touched specifically because I don't want to get sucked into them and end up shirking my responsibilities for the remainder of the semester. Because yes, that happens. This is the other reason I want to get everything done this semester as soon as possible. My motivation in doing so really boils down to this: with each successive task I complete, I am that much closer to being able to completely dick off for a month with no repercussions.

I've been trying to see, in a passive fashion at least, if there's anyone I know who would like to visit me over Winter Break. Yes, Kansas is fairly far out-of-the-way for most friends and/or family, but I do have several friends who travel a lot and/or are not opposed to stopping by at some point over the holiday season, including a few in-state (or otherwise relatively local) friends as well. As I've mentioned before, I'd love to fly back home to visit my parents and family there, but it's really not in my budget at the moment, and despite what my parents may say, it's not worth the money for them to fly me out there for a few days. In the past it's been incredibly expensive for them to do so, but they've done it anyway in spite of that fact. Really, if they want to spend that much money on me I'd rather they just drop it in my bank account instead so that I can more easily pay my bills or get my car worked on soon (such as getting it the new tires it needs), and I'll get back out there to visit when I can pay for it myself on my own terms.

For the moment, anyway, the car is running just fine. Hasn't leaked a drop of coolant in over two weeks, and has been performing as admirably as ever. If anything, it seems to like the cool/cold temperatures of fall for the most part. This can, really, only be a plus. The only thing that's popped up with it recently isn't a problem with the car at all, but with me -- I've gotten off my normal schedule of giving it a tank of gas after the week is over, due to some extra driving I had to do a few weeks ago. As I may have mentioned here before, I always get gas around the 150-mile mark, because the gas gauge doesn't seem to be exactly reliable a lot of the time. Usually, it will reach that mark after a full week of class, meaning I can get gas in it over the weekend when I go out to do my weekly shopping or errands, and think nothing of it. Because of the spark plugs/engine misfire, my gas mileage is erratic and hard to calculate -- sometimes it seems like I'm getting 22-25 miles to the gallon, and other times it seems like I'm getting about 15-20. Filling it up when my trip meter reaches 150 is a good way to level the playing field, generally speaking. Because of my extra driving a few weeks ago, however, in which I put a good 30-40 miles extra on the car (if not more; it's a long, embarrassing story I'd rather not tell here), my schedule is skewed, and now I must get gas on Thursday mornings when I leave the house -- as by that point I've reached 150 or have gone over it by several miles. Could I push it and wait until around the 200 mark to get gas? Maybe. Maybe. But I don't want to test it and see, otherwise I might end up on the side of 135 with an empty gas tank on the way to or from school. This is not something I want to deal with, obviously.

Yes, it's a V6, 215hp sports car, and it's old. Those gas mileage figures are accurate, folks.

In other news, I've got at least two surprise packages coming to me this week, out of the blue. My close friends Jane and Brittany have both sent me things. Why they've done so I'm not certain, but I'm certainly not questioning it. Jane made a needlepoint stitch artwork of Charizard (for you laypeople, that's a Pokemon) for me that she's been working on for months and just finished, so I know that's part of the reason she's sending me a package, but I don't know what else is in it. I told her jokingly that I hope she included a Fleshlight Fleshlight in the box, as I've jokingly (okay, only half jokingly) told my friends that could be the best birthday/Christmas present anyone could get me at this point. Brittany, on the other hand? She just sent me a message a few days ago to tell me to expect a package on Thursday, out of the blue, with no clue as to what it could be.

Both Jane (with her husband Wayne, of course) and Brittany have helped me out immensely over the course of the past five months, repeatedly, since the former girlfriend and I broke up, most of the time out of the goodness of their hearts and with no provocation, and I am greatly humbled by that. Jane, amongst other things, bought me a huge knife block set from my Amazon Wish List (now updated with a separate Christmas List!) and sent me two big tie-dye kits to keep my spirits up, and Brittany has sent me everything from a cookie sheet large and heavy enough to kill a burglar with, to silverware, a popcorn popper, and an electric screwdriver set. I haven't the foggiest idea what else either of them could possibly do for me, but needless to say even before they were planning to send these new things this week, I already had packages ready-to-mail to them as well (and in Jane's case, she's already received one of hers).

I mentioned it before, but in the spare room I have a stack of packages on the desk laying there, sealed and addressed, ready to take to the post office once I can build up a little extra money in my bank account for postage and free up the time to go mail them. Most of the people said packages are addressed to have no idea they're coming, so it's even better.

On that note, it's 2AM. I must go eat something, drink more coffee, take a shower, and attempt to do something productive or otherwise vaguely school-related before I venture in to campus and force myself to stay awake all day and evening. Doesn't look like I'm getting back to bed tonight.