Because management decided they were going to close the store, and the gate came down at 6:45. And why do you suppose they did that?
Because you could hardly see the street from the doors, that's why. It's snowing like the ass of a small white man after a dinner of chimichangas and warm beer, and it's blowing.
Okay: blizzard warning. That's what the weather site says, and I believe it. For the most part, the roads were all snow covered; parts of #MAIN_HIGHWAY had tire wipes but were otherwise covered. #MAJOR_FUNGAL_STREET looked like it hadn't been plowed for at least a couple of hours, and the snow had drifted...and furthermore there was about a quarter to a half-mile stretch where I was driving at 15 MPH in near-white-out conditions.
The driveway has about a three-foot plow drift across it; I had to aim the Jeep and gun it to get through. Once safely parked in my normal parking spot, I kissed the steering wheel. Good girl.
The first eight inches of snowfall was wet, heavy snow. As I came in I noticed that it felt like it had frozen solid as the temperature dropped. My snowblower is a one-lung single-stage job; I have my doubts about it being able to handle this guck, and if it can't, I'm going to call a plow and pay the freight and be glad about it, because this shit has "heart attack" written all over it. I am not going to go out there and shovel this by hand.
I have never had this happen before, where I went to work on a snowy day and they decided to shut down early because of the weather.
Anyway, it was dead there. Super Bowl Sunday with a blizzard on top? The people who did come there to shop were idiots, IMHO, and I wouldn't have even left the house today if I didn't have to. There was one guy who must've really needed his f-ing laptop because he was there at 6:40 to pick the thing up. If he'd gotten there ten minutes later we wouldn't have let him in. WTF.
...otherwise, there were so few customers in the store I was surprised when I saw one. I wanted to go around taking pictures of my coworkers all doing nothing and call the photoessay "Scenes from a snowy Super Bowl Sunday".
It was bad enough, when I got up, that I took El-Hazard with me to work again, expecting to have PLENTY of time to work on it. I was right.
Sheeze.
* * *
Jordan understands how to deal with islamic savages. If ISIS kills the Jordanian pilot they're holding captive, Jordan is going to kill all of the ISIS people they have captive.
That's the language the islamic savages understand. It's important, though, to follow through if they think you're bluffing and kill your guy anyway. Karl Denninger thinks threatening to nuke Mecca and Medina is probably the best way to demonstrate to the savages that we're serious about stopping their reign of terror, and I don't think he's wrong, but I have this tendency to shy away from erasing entire cities because a small band of savages attacked a Baskin-Robbins or something.
9/11--nuking Mecca would have been an excellent response to 9/11: "This is the only warning you primitive screwheads are going to get. If you don't stop attacking America you are going to REGRET it."
...and then you proceed to do all the things that Commodore Perry did in the Philippines, like burying the executed savages with pig parts. If your religion is your excuse for attacking us, expect us to use that to our advantage. (Incidentally, there is nothing you can do to a Christian's or a jew's corpse which would make him unfit for heaven. The same is not true of islam.)
We have pussyfooted around for too long, and given these shitheads the impression that because we aren't willing to play serious hardball, we're weak. It's time to demonstrate to them the difference between weakness and foebearance, and make them wish mightily that they hadn't forced us to teach them that lesson.
They won't learn any other way.
* * *
El-Hazard is now nearly in top form. I ran some anime and it played just fine, audio and video never running out of sync; if I can just get some free antivirus software on the thing that doesn't fuck everything up it'll be ready for action.
Avast! is no longer worth the effort. I installed Avast! on it today, and once I did, Internet Explorer was the only web browser that would work. Avast! kept Pale Moon from installing, too; once I pulled Avast! off the computer, everything worked fine again.
Then I spent about an hour removing all sorts of stuff I don't need, old backups mainly. I uninstalled WoW (since that's never going to work on that computer) and ended up freeing up over 50 GB of space. There's a total of about 65 GB available, which is better than it was, but not good. I priced 1 TB drives, but that's not in the cards for this month (or probably this fiscal quarter) so I'm going to make do with what I've got.
El-Hazard is now ready to become my primary writing machine, though. I just need to decide on a place for the Monk's Cell, clean it up, and ensconce the computer there with a monitor and such. Whee!
...but not tonight, nor tomorrow. Tonight I must make dinner, and tomorrow will have its own set of challenges.
On the plus side, at least I'm home safe from work.