Contingencies

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

-Charles Dudley Warner

I was looking this morning for an image online of the friendly wind spirit we've seen illustrated since childhood, the amused looking old man extending down out of a cloud and blowing on all us mortals here on earth.

Instead, my search brought me a bunch of AI generated images of what a computer thinks wind should look like. It's the stuff of nightmares, which in a way gives me some comfort as to the limits of the technology, at least for now. If this is what those ones and zeroes shoot back when asked to draw "wind", I'm thinking we have a ways to go before that same machine starts manipulating my thoughts.

At the same time, the image reflects, as much as anything, the mind of the person or persons who contributed to the dataset the computer had available to analyze the problem and solve it in the computer's own creepy way. A virtual world filled with data and images that lead to the above as an illustration of the ruach is troubling.

To my surprise, I find myself back at my desk in Corning this morning. It turns out the court in Brooklyn did, in fact, move the hearing this morning to February. Apparently that nugget made its way onto the docket maybe four days ago, but my staff couldn't figure it out. I'm wincing at the cost of the room at the Marriott that couldn't be canceled, but grateful that I wasn't away from P last night and this morning, and for the $4,000 in lost productivity and out-of-pockets I didn't suffer in this endless, sad pro bono case.

The radar promises another wallop of snow in a few minutes and lasting until after lunch. It's 35 outside and too warm for the stuff to accumulate, but the flip side of that good news comes at nightfall when all that melty snow turns to ice. P's going to have an interesting drive to work tomorrow morning, most likely.

The bigger impact of this furious return of winter, however, may come on Friday when it's time to fly home. I check the aviation forecast on my iPhone every morning, and every morning there's ice all the way from the surface to around 15,000 feet. The Columbia and I can deal with all sorts of inclement conditions; even with my deicer, however, I avoid icing conditions like they're fatal, which they tend to be.

What's the big deal about icing? Oh, all sorts of goodness.

The plane gets heavy. The camber of the wing changes, meaning less lifties. The prop starts to crust over, meaning the three little wings that comprise the propeller can't make lift and drag the plane forward. They also tend to accumulate ice unevenly and sling it off in chunks, throwing the engine out of balance and potentially causing the engine mounts to fail.

Other than that, no biggie. Which is why I try to avoid the stuff, even though the Columbia is fitted with the TKS deicing system and propeller heat. Those things should get us through a brief encounter with ice in a pinch, but they're not as effective as what the airliners use, and we can't stay in icing conditions for long.

So the forecast for snow and mixed precip almost every day between now and Saturday presents a challenge. That doesn't always mean icing, but the mixed stuff makes it quite likely, and it tends to happen fast as the droplets hit every surface on the plane and immediately freeze. If there's a break in the weather Friday afternoon, we scoot out of here. If not, maybe Saturday. If it's still snowing on Saturday, maybe Sunday.

If it's still snowing Sunday, however, we have a challenge ahead of us. Peg works on Tuesday in PC, and I have a Zoom mediation first thing Monday. Thus, it seems to your author that we need to make the call midday Saturday if we're going to be able to fly out over the weekend, and if not we need to start driving south (in the snow, unfortunately) to get as far south as possible Saturday night and set up a manageable drive to Panama on Sunday. This, in turn, likely means I'll miss the Bills-Steelers game on Sunday after lunch, which brings me much sadness. Still, it's better than being the lead news story in an article Monday morning that features a photo of a burned smudge on a Pennsylvania hillside, so we'll do what we have to do.

Of course, as with everything else in our lives these days, there's a ripple effect if things unravel thusly. Dio's supposed to be driving a car down for us the following weekend, then going to visit his folks before flying home. The airline ticket is already bought. I reckon if we drive this weekend we'll just need to buy a ticket to get him down to Tampa. No biggie.

Then there's the ski trip P's planning in mid-February, back at the condo on Canandaigua. If the plane's up here because we had to drive home, either we're arriving on Delta or we're driving. Neither sounds all that appealing, frankly, but we'll see how we feel about it when we get closer, if in fact the Columbia is stuck up here. The nice thing about staying in your own condo is that there's no worry about a cancellation fee.

Oh look. It's starting to snow outside. How lovely. And inconvenient.

All this snow has led to one moment of gratitude, however. When P and I got back from Sunday dinner at our friends' house over in Horseheads, the sidewalk and steps had all been shoveled. Leaving snow on one's sidewalk here is a massive faux pas, a sign of low breeding and poor work ethic. Ours had been the only one not shoveled within a couple hours of the weekend snow letting up, and I was red-eared with shame and planning to go out in the darkness and get it done Sunday night. That wasn't necessary, however, because as it turned out our friend Chris, the person who's painted most of Tara over the last couple years, took pity on us and drove over with a shovel to dig us out. Shoveling snow isn't much fun, and we're really grateful that Chris took care of us anonymously--we wouldn't have known it was even him, except that afterward he inquired if we were home because he encountered Dean and Slane, who've always taken to Chris, out in the yard.

This cancelled Brooklyn adventure gives me a little space to get ready for the major hearing this afternoon, and to do a little office housekeeping to make sure bills are paid, etc. I was going to order a couple new tires for the roadster, given that one is leaking, but I'm not sure with this forecast that I'll be able to get that two-wheel-drive machine down the hill to the shop between now and Friday. It's always something.