At 3AM, as I was still awake, I sent Daisy a message that included this photo:
This is what it looked like in York, where she was, at the I-80 entryway point. Note that there are no cars on the road. At all. Yes, I realize it was 3AM, but on major interstates like I-80, it's not like traffic just stops, ever. This led me to believe that the interstate was still closed, which I told her. I looked at a few other sites, a few other road-condition-status places, and was finally able to determine that yes, I-80 had reopened at some point, and the DOH was advising speeds of 0-25mph, "extreme caution."
Mind you, Daisy was in a hotel room two hours from home during normal driving conditions, and five hours from the time she had to be at work in the morning for her first day of orientation/training (which takes place in the daytime before she switches over to night shift next week).
Via Facebook, we messaged back and forth for a bit discussing road conditions and discussing the route home, which past Lincoln or so, showed that traffic was flowing mostly normally. Nebraska actually has a really nice, up-to-the-minute DOH website with real-time stats and alerts, so that helped a lot. Finally, around 4AM, she left York. I told her to let me know when she got home safely and to be very careful, and with nothing left for me to do to help, I went to bed.
When I awoke, I found that she'd made it back home in Omaha by a little after 7AM, and that the roads were indeed terrible -- she said there were cars and trucks run off the road and scattered all about the interstate, and for those three harrowing hours she had to be intensely focused on driving. A minor slip-up could've sent her off the roads and into a ditch, or something. The brief picture she painted reminded me of, as Parker mentioned last night, The Day After Tomorrow. Regardless, she made it home safely and with enough time to get ready for work -- she's been in her training since 8AM, across two different work "campuses" for it. I can guarantee you she's dog-tired, though. I certainly would be.
As for the events at my own home, well...it's quiet here. Really quiet, as it always is when Daisy leaves. I let the drain clear out while I slept, and when I awoke I started a load of laundry (washing all the towels I'd used to dry out the floors). It ran just fine, though it bubbled up through the floor drain a bit at the very end of the washer's draining cycle, which tells me that while the water table levels are much lower than before, it still needs more time to go back down. I stopped the washer and am waiting a few hours before I let it complete its rinse cycle, as it will dump the rinse water the same way and cause it to overflow again, badly, if I just let it run. The water table levels are much higher than they were last week, as evidenced by the fact that even flushing the toilets (as a test) while there's water in that overflow drain will make the groundwater rush up through it more. Not sewage or backwash or anything like that, but groundwater. I had to wash those wet towels, however, or they will become moldy and mildewed just sitting in the washer waiting on the water to go down some more over a few days. I have been using as little water as possible around the house since yesterday afternoon, as well, to let everything drain before I do anything else. I haven't showered, for example, for fear that with how it's backing up now from running a simple load of laundry will make it overflow again as well. I plan to shower tonight, with the plunger pulled, and let it drain out in the morning (if I have to) before I go to campus.
We're not supposed to get any rain this week, and the temperatures are supposed to be up around 75 by Friday, so hopefully the abundant sunshine and lack of precipitation will help that groundwater go down and dry up a bit more. If not, and it keeps backing up when I try to do even a small load of laundry or run the dishwasher or something like that, I'll get some of those foaming pipe snake bottles and dump them down that drain to see if it can clear out whatever's in there, since at that point I would imagine it's somehow clogged between my washer's drainage and the street. If that doesn't work I'll (regrettably) have to call my landlord and see what he thinks the problem is, but that's totally a last-resort option. As I've said before, this has happened before once or twice over the years, and it's usually precipitation-related in some fashion or another. It's more of an inconvenience than anything else, really. It's just a pain in the ass.
As for Daisy and her viewing of the Holy Trilogy, which I also mentioned before -- well, she liked the films okay, I think. She didn't protest them, though she did laugh at a few of the scenes with cornier dialogue (which was, really, to be expected). Her willingness to sit through them and purposely-veiled excitement to see where they were going and how they would end was exciting to me. I think she enjoyed them a lot more than she let on.
"Now there are three more to go," I told her. "The next ones take place before these ones. They fill in the backstory. The original trilogy is all about the redemption of Anakin Skywalker -- the prequels show his fall to the Dark Side and the rise of the Empire."
Again, I defend the prequels; yes, at times they are extremely goofy and/or slow. No, I don't think they were extremely necessary to complete the story. But, that being said, they do take care of that pretty well, sewing up most loose ends. And, again, I really defend Episode III as the secondary pinnacle of the series right beneath The Empire Strikes Back.
It also came to mind that aside from the aforementioned Episode III, I don't own the other prequels on DVD. I have an old VHS tape of Episode I somewhere, and I used to own Episode II on DVD before I sold it many years ago. This is a glaring oversight in my film collection -- I'll have to get the prequels on Blu-ray before Daisy comes back down here again. Luckily, Amazon has the collection for about $40 or so. Don't try to purchase the individual DVDs of each film either -- good lord they're expensive, since they're now out of print.
I've been working, off and on this afternoon, on my final "assignments" of sorts for the visiting writer. She's out of town until Thursday, and I meet with her for the last time on Thursday night at 5PM. I didn't want to stick around campus that long on Thursday, but I have little choice. Her final assignments are revision assignments, something I gave her the idea for last week when we met. To me, they're sort of pointless, as my thesis has already been finished and turned in. While there's always the chance that one of my readers or my director will say "hey, revise this and that," the chances of that happening are quite slim -- again, most of the poems in it have been heavily revised already compared to what anyone has seen before. However, for the other poets who meet with her on a weekly basis, revisions are quite helpful.
I also have some administrative stuff to do this week before Spring Break starts -- as you know, I'm collecting my students' papers tomorrow morning, and shall begin grading them as quickly as possible so that I can focus more on reading/studying for comps as much as possible over the course of the next two weeks or so. I'm trying to make a rough plan for that, actually -- plot out the poets I'm going to study on a day-by-day basis -- but I'm still working on it. I have a big T.S. Eliot collection coming to me in the mail, though it may not arrive for another week or so as I bought it from an independent bookseller on Amazon. Aside from that, the grading of the papers has to come first and foremost so that I can enter my students' midterm grades into the system and be done with them. The midterm grading system opens today, and closes on the 20th (the Wednesday of Spring Break), while the actual midterm date is on Wednesday the 13th. There's a lot of adding and calculations to be done in the meantime. I also have to print the "recommendation form" for my thesis out of the MFA handbook and get my director to sign it and return it to the creative writing program director by Thursday as well, as without that form he can't turn the thesis in to the "committee," whoever that may be. Paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. As you know, all of my readers have the final copy of my thesis -- the chair of the department, who is my third reader and a trusted friend/ally, told me that he'd been reading through it already and highly enjoyed it. This makes me swell with a little bit of pride, at least; I'm not sure he'd say that, however, if he and I weren't as close as we are, but eh. It still feels really nice.
As an aside, the washer just completed its drain/spin cycle for the second time and nothing came up through the floor drain, not even a bubbling or water visible four or five inches down inside the drain, so I'm guessing the water table is starting to drain out (either that, or the first time took out the clog of whatever was backing it up). I shall still be cautious, obviously, over the next few days, but it looks like the time of crisis for that has mostly passed.
But, yeah, here's my schedule for the rest of this week:
Tomorrow: Office hours 7-9AM. Teaching 9:30 and 11. Office hours 1-4 (grading, mostly). Writing Center 4-5. Home. Food. Daisy. Bed.
Wednesday: Grading. Grading lots. Taking care of any remaining things I have to do before Thursday (including refreshing my memory on the readings I'll cover in class). Possibly doing another cautious load or two of laundry. Possible short shopping trip for cat food/litter/small essentials.
Thursday: Teaching 9:30 and 11 followed by a long stretch of nothing in the afternoon before my meeting with the visiting writer at 5. Possibly/probably more grading, as I'm giving a quiz to my students on Thursday in class. Home. Food. Daisy. Bed.
Friday: Sleeping in as long as possible. Calculating midterm grades, as by this point hopefully all of my paper and quiz grading will be finished. Posting midterm grades. Posting paper and quiz grades on Blackboard. Planning out my "attack pattern" for the large remainder of my comps reading. Payday. Ordering the last of my comps books, if I have not already done so by this time (+/- 5-6 books or so). By Friday, it's also supposed to be 76 degrees, according to the Weather Channel's latest forecast.
I have a feeling that Saturday will be another "sleep until I can sleep no more" sort of day, because I'll need to gather my mental energy to begin plowing through the rest of my comps reading and studying from that point forward all the way through Spring Break. It also means I'll miss most of March Madness basketball, too; I can't focus on my studying while the TV is on, so I'll be doing much of my reading in silence and solitude on my living room couch with the cats piled around me.
As mentioned before, I also have to do my taxes over break. I'm not a fan of doing my taxes -- in fact, most of the time I dread it. A lot. It's just not a pleasant experience, and this year I'll probably get a little less back than I usually do, as I made an extra $1800 over the summer while I was teaching, which may disqualify me for some tax credits here and there.. I also had a big influx of Christmas orders from my online business as well, which doubled my income from that compared to 2011. While it's not something that takes more than a few hours (at most) to do, I just hate doing it. I file my taxes on the paper forms still, as well, since with those I can make mistakes and make changes and/or print out another form if I screw up the first one. I calculate them by hand and calculator, and do them by-the-book. Daisy shakes her proverbial head at me because I do this, but the one time I filed my taxes online (2007 or so) I ended up owing the feds $40-something because I didn't have to go through every little step and process that I can go through on the paper copies. Since then I've always taken care of it by hand and have gotten about $1k back in refunds every year, roughly. Kansas state taxes, on the other hand, are needlessly complicated and difficult to figure out as well; I've never seen a state tax form so complicated and unnecessary. I filed them online one year, but to do so they charge you $5. It's just easier to fill out the form there and stick it in the mail.
On that note, I have a raging headache, so I'm going to get something to eat (to see if that helps) and talk to Daisy a bit once she returns home from her first day of work. I'm excited.
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