Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

The ice storm finally hit last night. Most of the ice was left up north, but we got enough to have the schools close today. There's a healthy layer of ice on everything, topped with a fine dusting of sleet. Readers from traditionally slick states will probably scoff at the meager amounts of frozen precip that cause us to shut down, but we're just not set up to handle this stuff around here. I thought about calling in to work and telling them I can't get out because of the ice, but since I work from home I don't think they'll buy it.

At first, Weather.com said that the freezing rain would get here at 9:00 this morning. Then it was to arrive sometime around 1:00 this afternoon. Then 6:00. Now 11:00. I think it's not coming. We did have some freezing drizzle, so there's a thin layer of ice on the trees out front. And I slipped on a small patch of ice on the driveway. That's about it. I've been watching the weather radar , and see that there's a whole bunch of stuff going on to our north, but it's just not having much luck getting down here. Maybe I'll have some big weather related news to blog in the morning. Maybe not.

When I started this blog just over two years ago (Happy belated Blogaversary!) one of the first things I wrote about was an ice storm that came, delayed our flight to Utah, and closed schools while we were gone. (It was not as bad as the storm pictured above - that photo was poached off the internet.) Well, we're looking at an ice storm coming in again tonight. We'll see how this one turns out. The forecasts are similar to the storm two years ago. I made a run to the store to pick up a few things we might need. Hopefully power doesn't get interrupted, as we have electric heat and, unless it becomes a matter of life or death, the fireplace is not an option. Also, power out and no school could be a recipe for disaster. I'll keep you posted. If I can.

This past week hasn't been all hard work and stress. We did some fun things, too. Earlier this week, Kara and the girls melted chocolate chips and the girls dipped slices of banana. Yum! Another day we went to the park. We had some nice weather this week, but it is still January so we shouldn't really complain about cold, northerly winds. This park trip was shorter than Alyssa wanted, but we had a good time.

OK - now that I've whined about days and days 0f failure, I have achieved success! All I had to do was blog about it, and things started working. Y'all are the best - thanks!

It's Saturday, and I'm still working on the issue I thought was almost resolved two days ago. The reports back are that after another 12 hour day yesterday, I'm still no closer to getting this stupid machine to do my bidding. One problem is that I'm 1000 miles away from the device I'm writing the driver for. I make code changes, give them to a co-worker, and he tests them out and tells me that it didn't work. Not especially efficient, but that's the working arrangement we have. I need this to work - being successful at working remotely is what allows me to keep my job. Failure is not an option, so when success is elusive, stress is high. Another problem is this dang device, which I will not mention by name because, well, that would be bad form and all. But the interface they've designed for this thing is more of a puzzle than a technical document. I wish I were better at this type of puzzle.

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been fighting with some incredibly stubborn projects at work. After nearly 12 hours in my little chair today, I finally gotten one of them pretty close to resolved. Yay! More real blogging to come later.