it sparks joy so I won't toss it
We've got a light dusting of snow outside at the moment, 0.8 inches having fallen thus far. Flurries began yesterday afternoon, shortly after I got off my FaceTime call with Karen, very light ones, only barely accumulating anywhere by the end of the evening, by which time it had mostly stopped. At one point early yesterday evening I looked down through the living room window at the sidewalk on Pine Street, and there was Alan, our building manager, spreading salt all over the sidewalk.
Judging by all the chatter right now, you'd think we're all preparing for another "snowpocalypse" this weekend. And maybe we'll get one yet—there remains a "winter storm warning" for tonight, when we have the most snow forecasted. The local National Weather Service says we could get two to four inches overnight, and another 1 to 2 inches tomorrow. These hardly match the accumulations of snowfalls of the recent past, but what I can tell you is this will certainly be the latest in the winter we've gotten more than an inch (assuming we get more than an inch tonight) in the 23 years I've lived in Seattle. The only snow on record that's been later was in 2018, just one inch, on February 22.
Even the National Weather Service, though, has already updated the forecast high temperatures in the coming days to be slightly higher than they were before: 33° today, 35° tomorrow, 38° Sunday. If that continues to change, maybe there won't be any snow to speak of around on Valentine's Day morning after all. Although depending on how much we get tonight, there probably will still be some on the ground Sunday morning.
By the way, I started following Neil Degrasse Tyson on TikTok, and he's great. He just two days ago posted a fantastic video explaining how warmer winters can actually result in more snow—because flakes formed at or near freezing 32° are much bigger than flakes formed at much colder temperatures, resulting in deeper accumulation.
Shobhit had his Project Management virtual class yesterday, and for me, pretty much the entire evening got wasted in frustration trying to figure out why I was having such trouble converting one of my old home video files from .mpg to .mov file type so I could import it into iMovie. After quite some time, I'm pretty sure I finally figured out what was causing the problem: my iCloud storage was too full, both with too much backlog of just regular photos but, far more pressingly, with other video clips from all this digitization imported into iCloud for the same purpose. I have since deleted nearly all videos stretching back more than a year and a half, and as of this morning I deleted hundreds and hundreds of photos in my iCloud stream that are more than a year old. Except for pictures of cats. I like to keep those handy.
I kind of got into it a bit with Shobhit, because he attempted to help me with the problem—always a useless endeavor, as he assumes he knows more about Macs than he really does, as he is a PC user, and besides, I wound up identifying what was almost certainly the problem on my own in the end anyway. But, there was a point when Shobhit fell back into his infuriating stance that my keeping anything around that has sentimental value, including old home video footage, as "a waste of time." This complete and utter dismissal of things that are important to me, and things that bring me joy, drives me fucking bonkers. He has this insane idea in his head that if he thinks something is worthless, then everyone else should feel the same way. It doesn't work that way. Life doesn't fucking work that way. Sometimes I marvel that he functions in the world at all.
I would also suspect that part of his behavior was just his own frustration with his inability to solve the problem—not that it in any way justifies him talking to me that way. But, in any event, after he had gone to the living room to watch TV for a while, the next time he came back into the bedroom he was much more chipper, practically pretending nothing had even happened. Fine, whatever. Earlier I had pointed out the masses of paperwork he really does not need that he also keeps around for literally years, or the days off he spends just on the couch watching TV and movies all day. He always has some piss-poor defense of something he does but judges me for doing. It's basically an evergreen conflict between us, where he somehow thinks it makes sense that I should be held to a different standard than he holds of himself.
There was a moment last night when I was standing in the living room and shouting at him, "When people have time to themselves they do things that they enjoy. That is not a waste of time!" I'm so tired of him trying to tell me anything I do is a "waste of time," and has literally no value. By whose fucking standard? He had no response to that, predictably, so that was when I just turned and went back into the bedroom.
And now I am where I want to be, with that one file finally reformatted and imported into iMovie, so I can cut it into manageable chunks to upload to Flickr. I should have been at this point early yesterday evening, but whatever. I'll have a movie to watch and review tonight, so I'll probably get back to iMovie tomorrow. Either that or I'll be playing in some snow. I'm kind of wishing right now that I had bought a new pair of rain boots by now; I threw out the old pair that had a leak in them, thinking I would replace them and then I never did.
[posted 12:36 pm]