It must have been my taunting of the Season of Chill that brought its own chill to my home and work environment this last week. Not more than twenty-four hours after my last post my area suffered what they call an Ice Storm. First came the meager snow, far from the epic house-high accumulations of which I wrote. Then came the freezing rain, rain that starts as water 5000 feet up, but due to the cold lower layer, freezes on contact. Well, it froze to the snowy branches of thousands of trees, trees that had long enjoyed a leisurely lean out over open fields and roadways.
And then this legion of woody soldiers all began to fall. And fall they did. By the hundreds.
Big, fifty to eighty year-old trees fell into roads and onto houses and cars and onto fields and open-spaces everywhere. If the tree was “branchy” and lopsided then it probably lost major branchage if not outright fell over.
Fortunately, the power returned the next day. But the internet did not. Six days later it’s finally been restored. I’ve had to drive over to a friend’s and work from their bedroom as their net connection remained viable. I mean, I work from home, but if I can’t connect… “Sorry, Mole, you’re no good to us — disconnected.”
Spending the evenings watching old DVDs (Harry Potter), as the cable was also kaput, was nice. But, oy, when you’re jonesing for the juice and even the cell-tower’s data is temporarily wounded, no power, no net, no cell-coverage… It felt like the 90’s. The 1890’s that is.
How good we have it. How much we take for granted. Sure got cold. Maybe if it hadn’t been winter…
Oh, and WP’s Block Editor really does suck. If Microsoft Word had used such an idiotic block metaphor it would have died along with Clippy. No editor worth its salt forces such a paradigm on users. Adding blocks TO a document is vastly different than forcing all content to be blocks. If Word or Google GDocs ever adopted such a draconian technique I’d go back to writing in Notepad.
I suspect WP might have done this to make it easier to inject ads into posts as content is schlepped around the net.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Seeing more and more of this “weather kills 80-something year old things” all the time. It’s almost like the climate is changing…
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I still don’t get the blocks complaining, which at this point is pissing up a rope. A little research will show that Gutenberg Technology (GT) has a much stronger hold in the market than just WP. As for the Microsoft argument, what is the most widely used presentation software for going on three generations, available in 102 languages? Hint -.ppt – A block editor.
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Well, they spent money on all that alt energy and it froze up. Surprisingly the grid is run by career politicians who don’t live here. The border is a whole other discussion.
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Hi A. Mole,
What did Mark Twain say? People like to talk about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Well, A. Mole, I want to congratulate you for clearing up that quote. I looked it up, expecting to find the attribution in one of Twain’s books, but to my surprise, it turns out that Twain took it from a guy named Charles Dudley Warner. He was also a writer in the same time period as Twain and it seems pretty solid that Warner first composed the line. Good on him, cause it has been a keeper as your post shows. ” …what they call an Ice Storm”, indeed. By the way, I was born and raised in Texas, but the place has become so conservative and crazy for Trump that I often find myself saying, fuck Texas. I doubt if I will ever go home again. Thanks. Duke P.S. Fuck those blocks as well. What a sorry piece shit those things are.
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Why are the aborigines laughing at us?
Why are the cave men laughing?
So many folks today don’t seem to believe in Climate Change – or what is now being called Climate Weirdness.
Well Hello Mother Nature. Oh shit what have we done?
Maybe it is time to wake up to science?
Happy Happy am I that I do have power, but happier yet if we can get our act together before it is too late.
Impassioned am I
On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 7:43 PM Anonymole – apocryphal agitators wrote:
> Anonymole posted: “It must have been my taunting of the Season of Chill > that brought its own chill to my own home and work environment this last > week. Not more than twenty-four hours after my last post my area suffered > what they call an Ice Storm. First came the meager snow” >
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Impassioned you are, indeed.
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WP used to be for writers. Now, with all those Blocks, I feel like it’s for social media, photos, and nonsense. Your ad idea might be right. Hmmm…
I’m glad that the falling trees did not damage your house/car/you.
No Internet… It’s incredible how we can’t live without it. Although I am fine with going off the grid, it needs to be done on my terms. If I lose the connection without being prepared, oh, the fury…
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So true. My choice, only.
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Do you think the falling trees have a beneficial effect in the long run?
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If I recall my ecology classes… it goes: pond, marsh, glade, shrub-land, deciduous forest, conifer forest. Falling trees in dense forest are opportunities. “Yeay! The old man is dead. Race you to the sunshine!” Plus all those nutrients tied up in some ancient snag suddenly freed. And all the opportunities for burrows and beetles, bugs and fungus.
Here? They surely keep the arborists busy. They’re cleaned up and often replaced within the month. “Wha’d ya mean, fallen tree?”
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Yeah that’s what I was thinking of
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You’re a prophet–now just don’t start writing about plagues of locusts or spiders falling from the sky!
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Too late…
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Ooh–my life might be getting more interesting…
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We had ice storms in Kansas City when I was there – deadly and scary but the aftermath is often beautiful – strange, deadly beautiful. Stay safe!
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…not that you’re in Texas…but what the hell, everyone can just fly to Cancun.
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What just as karmic is that this city has a moratorium on cutting down trees. You can’t without a permit. And if neighbors contest your desire, they can kill your permit. 1/2 the trees could vanish and nobody would be able to tell — there are so many of them.
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imagine if all that time and money were spent building a grid in Texas, rather than a wall. OMG, what a chuckle. Karma? I dunno. The universe delivers…
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I think I’d like to live in the 1890s, at least for a short while, and then come back to the present to tell everyone all about it.
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Looks beautiful but scary.
We used to have restrictions all the time during war and post war years. It’s fun when you’re young. Now it would be frustrating as hell.
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And if we find life on other planets, why is it suddenly “marvelous and sacred,” when the life here is classified as easily disposable?
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Yes, we take everything for granted…then complain. Like the Joni Mitchell song says, “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone…”
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I obviously missed that your last post was fiction. Glad you’re recovering from this less apocalyptic version.
We had a lot of branches (and some trees) fall from frozen rain where I live too. It left a horrendous mess in my front yard that I spent two afternoons cleaning up, and discovering how out of shape I am.
I’m with you on the damn block editor. Last week the text suddenly started showing up pretty small. I reported it to support and they logged it as an issue with development, to be resolved at some point in the future, I hope. About 80% of the time the thing works like a regular text editor, but the 20% when it doesn’t drives me nuts.
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Ice storms are brutal. Sad about all those trees. The internet is starting to feel like an organ; without it we feel crippled.
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