Nostradamus was right!

I've had a lot of free time on my hands, what with school being canceled for the past 3 days and already canceled for tomorrow. Let me tell you, this is UNPRECEDENTED for my district, which usually doesn't even close down for ONE day, regardless of the weather.

This unusual and scary activity got me thinking about apocalyptic prophesies, and I did a little research on the Mayans and Nostradamus. I gave up on the Mayans after awhile, because they seemed mostly obsessed with 2012. But I found some very interesting things while looking through Nostradamus's quattrains.

Here's one you may have never heard:

Round the day of the rodent,
the South will freeze;
Snake bearer returns,
while the children go untaught.

I KNOW!!! When I first read that, I immediately associated it with the 4 day inclement weather break we have been granted here in Dallas!

So I kept reading, to see what else the Big N had gotten correct.

Look at this one:

In the metal behemoth,
Steel and Cheese collide;
The man with two faces profits,
while the natives suffer.

Read into it what you will, but I happen to think that sounds an awful lot like the big Super Bowl festivities going on this weekend!

One last one, and this is going to blow your mind...

The aging warrior does not
go gently into the night;
Enemies remain, fires flare,
Yippee-ki-yay.

SWEET! There WILL be a Die Hard 5!!!!

Got snow days?

Well, as I figured, school is in session today. As I write this, I am looking at weather reports saying that it is 28 degrees outside, there is drizzling freezing rain, and there are ice spots all over the major Dallas roads. All traffic camera shots show accidents and wrecks and backups many miles long.

But none of that matters to my district. They don't seem to care that most of their employees have a pretty good drive to get to their school. At least I don't live in Mesquite any more, where I had no choice but to be on a couple of highways for a while. Now my trip uses surface roads that (hopefully) shouldn't have frozen up over night.

What does really surprise me this morning is that the other school districts around mine are not closed. Usually Dallas is the only one that stays open during horrible weather like this. But today, Plano, Ft. Worth (which in the past has seemed to close down if somebody sneezes), Arlington -- they're all open.

My INTERACTIVE MONDAY question today is a simple one -- What are snow days like in YOUR district? Do you get many? What has to happen for you to get one? When are they made up?

Have a good one, and be safe!!

Snow day!!

I am sitting at home today, enjoying my snow day, not having to go in and teach the kids.

You may have noticed that today is Sunday, so I would be sitting at home, watching football, not having to go in and teach the kids anyway. But today it's SNOWING!! :)

Given my district's former tendencies, it is extremely unlikely that school will be cancelled tomorrow, but there's always that 0.0001% chance...

All that snow...

Yesterday, as I mentioned, was a snow day here in Dallas. Not a day off from school, mind you, but a day where we had classes with 3-4 inches of snow on the ground outside. This is about as rare in Dallas, Texas as Britney Spears making sense in an interview.

I usually keep my shades closed in the classroom, but I opened one up so we could see the snow falling out in the courtyard. At around 9:15, I had to open several more, because our power went out and we needed the extra light. The power was out until almost 10:30.

In the meantime, after we got our initial work done (in the low light), I thought I'd give the kids a bit of a reward and take them outside to play in the snow. We got all bundled up and ready to go when one of the administrators walked by and said that no one was allowed to go outside.

D'OH!!! They won't even let us play in the snow!!!

By lunchtime, after-school tutoring had been cancelled, and it was a good bet that school would be cancelled for Friday (today). The kids were admonished, in a PA announcement, to go STRAIGHT to their buses and not play around in the snow.

Of course, as I was leading my class out to the buses, and I kept hearing other teachers shouting, "NO!! Put that snow down!!" I kept thinking, "I can't possibly tell a kid not to make a snowball when I want so desperately to make one myself!!!"

As soon as the first bus took off, I was throwing snowballs at other teachers. It just seemed such a waste of good snow NOT to use it!!

Sure enough, today was an official inclement weather day, and there was no school. While awesome in one sense, it stinks in another, because I had ordered some Valentine's Day flowers to be delivered to my fiance at her school. No go on that one.

But we did take advantage of the snow to build a snowman and take a few pictures. And thankfully, we haven't lost power here yet!