Snow Day!

I always appreciated snow days growing up in Virginia. Inevitably, school was cancelled because the buses couldn't reach the kids who lived out in bumfuck where it was icy, but in the city everything was perfectly normal. I was under the impression that snow days just don't happen here in upstate NY, with all the plows that make giant black piles of snow and the ice trucks that appear to have caused something metal to rust off the underside of the Toyota. But after being woken up every half hour in the twilight this morning to the sound of ice hitting the window (or, as Patrick apparently thought it was in his somnolent haze, the sound of my repeatedly hitting the space bar on my laptop), I checked the Cortland website - yup, closed. As a teacher, this means I have to reschedule the lab I had planned for today, the lab that I spent two hours and $1.83 on last night, attempting to cut through hamhocks with a hacksaw. As a student, this means I will probably have to walk to the post office to mail off my dissertation fellowship application, a layer of ice hitting the back of my neck the whole way. But as a researcher who has put off a looming paper deadline in favor of more immediate due dates, today is a great chance to catch my breath and get a head start on my data analysis.

But first, I should deal with the evidence of last night's massacre. There are two hand saws sitting at the bottom of the only bathtub in the house, covered with bits of flesh, and two chunks of bone sitting in a bowl of bleach in the sink. That's the last time I attempt to extract fresh bone for use in lab, or at least the last time I use pig knuckles, which are damned hard to cut through.