The Washington Post reports that the “wintry mix” is paralyzing the DC area. Over at Wonkette, folks who grew up in snowier places than the U.S. southeast are harumphing and growling like 80-year-old curmudgeons that these wimps in Washington can’t deal with a little “frozen water.” Makes ‘em feel superior to the yokel natives, I guess.

Whatever. Washington, DC is not New York or New Hampshire, for God’s sake. I’ve made this argument for about 25 years. Why would a community that hardly ever gets any snow invest tons of money on snow removal preparations? The fact is, the side streets are still slippery and dangerous to drive on.

But the point of this post is to talk about the solitude I’m experiencing today. My wife is running a large week-long national meeting in DC, and is camped out in a hotel in town. My daughter has gone in to work with her for the day, since she’s not at school.

Therefore, I’m at home alone, still unshaven and unshowered at 12:30 PM, wasting hour after hour customizing a couple of blog sites and drinking coffee.

I find that I’m tyrannized by my solitude. My school district has already cancelled school for tomorrow (the only responsible thing they could do, Wonkette, if there’s ice and snow on the roads the school buses travel). Therefore, I have nothing pressing me to come alive, really. My neighbors are already busy shoveling their sidewalks while I’m blogging and taking photos. Guess I’d better go out and be responsible now.

I believe that by the end of this two-day forced vacation from teaching I will have had enough of snow days. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled life now.

In the DC area we live right at the ice-snow line. North and west of us they get snow. South and east of us they get rain. Where we live we get the ugly, nasty mixture of sleet and freezing rain cutely referred to as “wintry mix.” Heavy ice accumulates on power lines and trees. Sometimes at my house the power goes out for 36 hours or more.

So they didn’t call off school this morning, but they sent us home two hours early. My commute home, which normally takes about 40 minutes, was well over an hour.

Some places get real blizzards, like in this video by a Canadian graduate student. Not us. We get slush. And then a hard freeze.

Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their fingers and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.

This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.

I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.

I’m in the middle of a massive server move this week, and I’m getting more education than I bargained for.

I’m trying to move three domains (thewordnerds.org, davesmidlife.com, and daveshepmagic.com) to one account at BlueHost. The BlueHost folks are very helpful, their servers are apparently robust, the company is the beneficiary of many good online reviews, the service is cheap.

As you can see if you are one of the six people worldwide reading this post (ever), davesmidlife.com came over without a problem. It’s a little old WordPress blog and nothing more.

The big, important one is for The Word Nerds. The blog seems to have moved okay, and the forum has also successfully moved (although I still have to install anti-spambot modifications).

I am quite concerned that my iTunes does not see the Word Nerds podcast feed, but it may be too soon after the repointing of my domain name. Maybe the Internet is still looking in two places for my site. (Man, I hope so. This looks unsettlingly like a problem I was having with GoDaddy before I dumped them.)

Also, my K2 WordPress theme for The Word Nerds doesn’t work, so I’m using plain vanilla, with no graphic header and no sidebar links, for the time being.

Several domains that I own, that I intend to forward to the ones above, are not forwarding properly.

I am learning a lot about MySQL, WordPress, domain name assignments, and the Internet in general. However, I would have been happy with somewhat less education and somewhat more transparent functionality.

About a year ago, when the film version of The DaVinci Code was about to come out, I wrote here about my sheer contempt for the novel. I’m a Tom Hanks fan (That Thing You Do is one of my favorite light and fluffy movies), but the DVC film was, by all accounts, a disaster. (I must admit that I did not spend the $9.00 charged by Northern Virginia cinemas to see the thing.)

An entry today in the brilliant linguistics-related blog Language Log reminds me exactly why I hated the novel so much. A post by Geoffrey K. Pullum about a BBC interview with Jesse Sheidlower pointed, in a footnote, to an earlier post about DVC. In November 2004, Pullum took Brown to task for his facile use of an anarthrous noun phrase to open just about every one of his novels.

Reading Pullum’s post was a wonderful validation of my contempt for Brown’s work. A year ago I had developed the uneasy feeling that I was a strange fish for not liking DVC. Everybody else seemed to, after all.

But renowned linguist Pullum’s post reminded me why: Brown’s a hack. (See the November, 2004, post to understand the joke in that last sentence.)