Madness

Spring semester, day twenty-six

Winter Storm Rocky has hit full-force, though he's hit considerably lighter than they were predicting last night. You wouldn't be able to tell that from looking outside here in Newton, where I have almost a full foot of new snow on the ground -- I can't really tell you how much, but it's still coming down, now, at midnight, hard. The electricity has been flickering for hours on end, every ten minutes or so. There are power outages everywhere, all over Wichita and the surrounding area, and if it's not absolutely essential, it's been closed -- including every school district I can find, thousands of businesses, etc.

Except for one thing.

The university.

Literally every school district has closed. Businesses are closing. Over 1,000 homes are without power in the Wichita metro area, according to Westar's map. Every other small college and/or trade school has closed. Even private and Catholic schools have closed. The university? Still open.

This defies all logical sense.

I'm not one of those whiny brat kids who's like "everyone else is closed, why aren't we closed?" No, I'm far from that. I was born and raised in West Virginia, on top of a mountain, where snow like this was commonplace and we still went to school. And, to top that off, both for high school and college I lived 15-20 miles from school.

I also understand that three of the past four class days have been canceled by these storms -- they closed today, even though it didn't get bad down in Wichita until late this afternoon. Still, that's no excuse -- if the weather's horrible, you close. It's that simple. The safety of your faculty, staff, and students comes first and foremost, especially for a school that's known as a "commuter school," where the vast majority of its students live off-campus and/or out of town.

Update: I have just learned that the 1,000 homes without power has ballooned, in the past 30-60 minutes, to 3,000.

University's still open, folks.

It's madness.

Most of us are assuming they're waiting until morning this time -- no reason to jump the gun, so to speak, as they did today. But even with that, I think they're making a bit of a mistake. It is terrible outside. It's blizzard conditions, and is expected to keep that up until morning.

Further update: Power is out in Valley Center and Maize, on the west side of the city. Maize is where I taught this past summer -- it's not too far (maybe, oh, five or six miles west) from the city's center. Ten at most. It's spreading. It would not surprise me if I lost power here at some point tonight.

Anyway, yes, most of us who teach are assuming that we'll get up in the morning to see the university has closed, but I'm not so sure. Colleagues like Parker have long gone to bed -- he teaches at 8AM and said that if the university remains open, he'll be there (driving his Gigantor Jeep). I told him, basically, that he may as well not bother -- even if he can make it there, he has six students in his 8AM class, and the majority of them probably won't make it in. He doesn't teach again after that until the evening.

I sort of jumped the gun myself -- I knew by this afternoon for a certainty that it would be way, way too difficult to get to campus in the morning, though I waited until 10:30 tonight (to see if the University would close) before I sent out my emails to my students cancelling class. I told them that even if the university doesn't close tonight to A) be sure to watch in the morning to see if it's closed then, and B) to check to see how many of their other professors and instructors will cancel class, because I doubt I'll be the only one if the university remains open. As for their lesson plans, we're picking up where we left off, albeit shifting the schedule a week later.

Aside from that, I told them if they could afford to do so, to stay home and out of this mess of a storm we have beating us down like a red-headed stepchild.

Well, I didn't use that terminology, but you get the drift.

Speaking of drifts, they're bad. Snowdrifts, driven by a near-constant 30+mph wind, have reached two or three feet in some areas, including outside my house and garage. It's crazy. It looks like I live in the arctic. And, once more, there will be shoveling tomorrow and Wednesday if I want to be able to get out of this house on Thursday morning -- something that is kind of important.

Even further update: 3,000 without power has been changed to an innumerable "thousands," and is rapidly growing/spreading north towards Newton. There's a good chance I won't have power in the morning, or that I'll lose it sometime in the overnight for a while. I do not like this prospect, and am considering turning on the electric blanket in a few minutes to make sure the bed is already nice and toasty when I get into it. On the plus side? Perhaps the university will lose power and close down, or enough people will lose power to where they'll realize hey, maybe we should've closed down last night.

My day today was spent immersed in literature; I read through the rest of Emily Dickinson's collected poems and took notes on all of the pertinent ones. I also got my Sharon Olds book in the mail (though my other Amazon shipments were delayed yet again), so I can work through that and some other stuff tomorrow as well. The bad thing is that if the school doesn't close, I have to reschedule my time with the visiting writer, which is tomorrow afternoon at 1. While I doubt she'll make it in either, and she has appointments from Thursday, Friday, and today to catch up on, I need to at least make the effort to contact her and tell her that I won't be able to get there, and see if I can reschedule for Thursday. She gave us two assignments over our time off, and I've been working on them off and on for the better part of the past hour or so. Once I email her, I'll probably give up for the night and will go to bed.