Snow

It has been snowing here. The kind of snow we only get about every 10 years. It snowed a couple of days before Christmas, they shut campus down that afternoon because of it, and sent everyone home. My shovel cracked that day. It has been cold enough that most of that snow is still with us, even if it is now ice.

We have discovered that our big 15 passenger van is not all that good with the snow. Mostly because we don't get our streets plowed or salted around here. Tara took it to get Emma from school today, and got stuck. Not happily stuck. The Stake President's wife eventually came around and helped get her on the road.

Tara and the girls played out in it this afternoon. They seem to have had a good time. I ended up getting Kate and Mary from school later in the truck, which really doesn't have the same problems. Tara and I spent about an hour and a half shoveling this afternoon, in the hopes of being able to get the van out easier. I took the van to the Stake Center this evening, but it took 5 minutes to get it out of the spot in front of the house. I parked it in a place at the Stake center I thought I could get out of easily, but no dice. I had to get towed 10 feet to get out of the spot. The van has "Stabilitrak" which I think it GMC's version of traction control, but I think the thing engages just a little too early. The thing really cuts the power to the tires, it feels like if I had 5 seconds more, I could get out of both places I was in. We didn't know how good we had it with the MPV. I would say we need snow tires, if it weren't for the fact that it is usually only this bad for a few days every winter, not 2 weeks or more.

Yesterday morning, I parked the truck in the underground parking on campus, I was hoping all the snow in the back would melt so I could take some of the stone out of it to put it in the back of the van. No luck yesterday, most of the melted, but it snowed like crazy last night, and there was more snow in it this morning than melted yesterday. I parked there again today, and a lot more of the snow melted. I found an exhaust vent to park near. I put about 200 pounds of stone in the back of the van, but it didn't seem to help any. Maybe another 200 pounds would do it.

We had a power outage on campus today, the rumor going around was that it was a car plowing into a power pole. We were in the data center at the time, not really any of our stuff went down, but the bookstore called me about 20 minutes later, one of their servers would not boot back up. They bought a UPS a couple of months ago, but I couldn't get them to take the time to plug their servers in. (They didn't want to schedule the downtime.) The server that was down was their production machine, and the system board was fried. I spent some time getting the server running on another piece of hardware. Fun for me, fun for them.