Thursday, February 1

 

 

Snow this morning; lots of snow. And wind: lots of wind. It had fallen all night and it continued to fall heavily. I trudged to the bus stop through ankle deep flurries of fresh snow with the wind whipping snow into my face. Everyone had their heads well down and their hoods wrapped around their faces.

I got to Arcada to discover the usual chaos around Period 4, where the first and second year students have long production periods that, by tradition, trump everything else. I had the task of rearranging my two courses to fit in with the new production weeks. Leila wondered why the production weeks could not get settled earlier, before we scheduled the other courses. I explained the ways in which the power of tradition overrule the powers of wisdom. She laughed.

I spent most of the morning sorting my courses out. The new timetables meant that I had to rearrange the structure of the courses. Structuring information might have got better, for taking place in a shorter time. Interactive Storytelling got a whole lot worse.

Once I had done this my laptop starting behaving badly and I guessed correctly that an unannounced update had arrived. I used this as an opportunity to switch my external drive from my trusty 1TB Seagate to my new 2TB Toshiba. This took a couple of hours longer than expected, during which I started to plan detailed, session by session, plans for the two courses. I consoled myself with the knowledge I had had stopped looking at a screen for three hours while still doing something that needed doing.

At 14:15 I stop and go for a walk. I walk around the building and bump into Mikke. I then go downstairs and outside into the swirling snowfall and take a photograph of the junction where the road from Kalasatama meets Hämeentie. The snow blurs everything and whites out most of the colour. Only a few signs and vehicles prevent me from imagining that the world had turned monochrome. I get cold within seconds and go back inside.

For the rest of afternoon I will look through student assignments.

I will leave early because Irma will work late tonight. I will leave knowing that I will have to dig a path before I let Sunshine out, or he simply won’t go. Even though the snow continues falling I will have to clear the drive and the paths before the snow freezes overnight.