In which twitter got me yesterday afternoon off!

I follow the U-B on twitter, and noticed while at work yesterday afternoon that they’d posted an article about the city wanting people off the streets due to the extreme weather.

So I texted the article link to everyone at work – including management – and within fifteen minutes they’d closed the office and sent everyone home! Those of us with broadband connections were invited to take our VoIP phones with us and finish the work day from our home offices. (Most of our tools are accessible with a web browser, so to work from home all we really need to do is plug in a VoIP phone and open some browser tabs. I’m also running LogMeIn for access to the few things I really need on my work box, like the SSH tunnel to the POP server.)

We all piled out of the office into the snow. Bindu and I jumped into Teh BF’s car and he surfed us to Loney’s, where I bought some veggies and a loaf of bread and picked up stamps for G’ma. The snow at that point was well over a foot deep and still coming down. Kaje dropped us off in front of our house and then left to see if he could get into his own driveway.

I set up my VoIP phone in the front room and logged in. I made a few callbacks and then sat around for awhile before realizing there were no incoming calls. Snooping revealed that there was no one else logged into the queue. I IMed a couple of the supervisors and got no response. Finally, I called the office with my cell… and discovered that we were closed until Friday morning!

So I clocked off and spent the evening playing with my iThing, eating too many cookies, and watching Stardust with the family. (It was a lovely little heartwarming fairy tale, and DeNiro as a pouf was hilarious.) Then I laid in bed with my dog, watching episodes of Firefly (thanks, bro!) on my iThing until about two in the morning.

Then I slept. Apparently I slept weird, because I woke up with my back and neck all fucked up. (Stupid ancient bed with a ditch in the middle! I really need to get myself a futon or something; sleeping in sprung beds is hurting me because I’m so old now.) I did a couple rounds of sun salutations this morning and they helped, but sitting in this old chair in front of the computer isn’t helping. I downed an Advil before lunch – I made veggie fried rice – and it’s helped some, but I think I might take another.

Working from home is hella charming. I’ve really never done it before; when I was in engineering at an ISP in Iowa I couldn’t get bandwidth out at my house so I never really did much from home other than reboot web servers.

There is snow everywhere and the city apparently isn’t very well equipped to deal with the roads under these conditions. I’m enjoying working from home today – in my pajamas! – and might do so again on Monday if we really do get the additional six inches they’re threatening.

It’s snowing right now, for the record.

I chatted with Teh BF earlier and he’s all kinds of behind in his Xmas shopping. So is my G’ma, and so am I. I think most of us thought we’d just run a few quick errands here and there… and then we got this crazy weather and none of us have been anywhere since. If we get hit with another storm tomorrow, I think a lot of people will be getting rain checks on some of their Christmas gifts!

For more Walla Walla Blizzard ’08 pics, check out the Your Walla Walla Flickr pool.