A snow day is 100% a Lowfi Hip Hop Day [work, status]

[rebeccmeister]

People here in Albany, NY have been feverishly checking the weather and school closure lists since yesterday afternoon. When I headed over to rowing practice, my institution hadn't canceled anything, and everything was quiet and clear. Promptly at 8 am, while I was finishing a cup of coffee with teammates at our favorite local coffee hangout, the snow started.

My institution still hadn't called it, so I started to head towards campus. By the time I reached the end of Van Rensselaer Boulevard to turn onto Route 378 by the Albany Rural Cemetery, it was snowing hard enough that I could barely see where I was going (glasses-on *or* glasses-off), and I wasn't relishing the thought of climbing up and then flying down curvy, narrow Schuyler Road while not really being able to see and in increasingly slippery conditions.

So I pulled over and messaged my students to let them know that we'd be pivoting to video instruction. It wasn't even so much the immediate conditions as the thought of how much worse things were likely to get for the eventual trip home.

I'm pretty sure my students are fine with this decision. I'd messaged them yesterday anyway, to tell my commuting students they should use their best judgment about whether or not to come in to campus, and to note that we'd pivot to video if classes were canceled.

And so I'll spend the rest of the day at home, with some Zoom meetings interspersed, playing the Lofi Hip Hop channel and grading student papers while the cats snooze on their heating pads.

This heating pad is a new acquisition, but a little catnip seems to have persuaded George to give it a try.





Cozy AF in here. Dunno why my institution thinks it's a good idea to have students and employees out on the roads today.

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

Snowstorm is causing high anxiety at this end of the Hudson Valley. Everything is closed.

[rebeccmeister]

Quick! Buy all the bread and milk!

It is a lovely day to be indoors, looking out at all that snow. Snow shoveling is also an invigorating activity, in moderation.

[mallorys_camera]

I'm baking banana bread. 😀

[rebeccmeister]

But more seriously, I just had a Zoom conversation with a commuter student who had a sketchy drive to get to campus, and is now stuck there until things clear enough to safely leave and go home. The decision to not close for the day was bone-headed.

[mallorys_camera]

Completely bone-headed.

[rebeccmeister]

All I can figure is there must be some sort of weird financial gyration at play. Ugh.

[twoeleven]

Sounds like a typical stupid management trick like ordering people back into the office, when WAH part of the time was demonstrably better.

[rebeccmeister]

Not that I'd advocate for making people travel to a workplace in a snowstorm, mind you, but there was a recent NYT article ("gift") about how younger workers are coming to recognize and appreciate many of the benefits of in-person work.

[bluepapercup]

My office never closes but the vast majority of us took advantage of the hybrid policy to work from home today. I had to go to PT in the morning and just snuck back in under the wire, the roads were getting slick when I arrived back home. It snowed wet snow all day and has now changed over to freezing rain. Everything will be a sloppy, half-frozen mess in the morning, ugh. But was utter coziness while it lasted!

Cobweb has a similar heated mat and he's glued to it from December to March every year. :D

[rebeccmeister]

Yeah, it was looking like things would peter out and turn to slop by the time it got to you. But freezing rain is terrible! I hope things clear up reasonably well, soon enough. The flipside of it all is that it's nice to have this kind of precipitation in early December, when it gets down to it!

[ivy]

Oh, that last photo is the cutest!