The crazy weather

It was cold last week. So cold, that I let one of my Friday classes go 20 minutes early, because they were all shivering, and even I - moving around at the front of the classroom and wearing a sweater and fingerless mitts - was cold.

It was warm this weekend. Sunday it hit the low 70s.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a headache. It didn't QUITE rise to the level of migraine (and I decided not to get up and take the meds, because they contain caffeine, and I was afraid that that would end my sleeping the rest of the night).

Then it got very windy. I don't know about what time the wind started, but it woke me up and I didn't really sleep all that well. Partly because unpredictable noise keeps me from sleeping (a constant, steady noise, like white noise does not, but noises that vary in intensity or occurrence, like a dog barking, does). Partly because it was REALLY winding and I was worried about branches coming down off my trees and damaging my roof (or worse, the neighbor's roof - this is a rental house that I think is still owned by my extreme-perfectionist neighbor, the one who counseled me to have my big old pecan tree cut down, because it dropped leaves on the yard of the house she owned as a rental property). Or a branch coming down and blocking my drive and being too big and heavy for me to budge at 0-dark-30 when I leave the house to go to work.

None of that happened, but my rollcart (today is trash day) did tip over. I righted it but I suspect it may tip again before pick-up time, and as they use one of those arm-trucks with a minimum of guys, they may not bother to take the trash from a tipped-over rollcart. Oh well. I only had two smallish bags in there and it could hold over until next week if necessary.

I did have dreams in which the wind played a factor - trying to recover stuff that was blowing away, other dreams where there was oppressive noise.

It was super-cold coming to work. Not that the air temperature was so awful (upper 30s) but the wind was strong enough to generate a pretty uncomfortable wind chill. Surprisingly, my office is warmer than it's been, but maybe that's a hangover from it being warm yesterday. (I dread what room 204 will be like; that's the one where we've totally shut down the ventilation because it only blows cold air. Yes, we've called it in. Multiple times.)

They were hinting at flurries for tomorrow a while back, but that's gone out of the forecast. I have mixed feelings about that: first, we really need water, in whatever form it might come. And second, if we have to have a snow day, a Tuesday is the day I can most afford to have it. But campus would probably be open, anyway. (Then again: Our Dean is asking for "reports" of anyone injured during the last ice incident, when they opened campus probably a day too early, out of fear of "But we can't miss TWO days of exam week!" Luckily, I didn't fall, but I know lots of people who did.)

***

After here, there be some spoilers for this weekend's new episode of MLP. (I already Tweeted a few of my reactions).

I remember thinking early in the episode, "Why is Fluttershy going away for this episode? Does Pinkie Pie have a lot of dialog and they didn't want to overtax the voice actress? (The same voice actress does both characters). Then I realized: Oh. Plot point. Of course they'd have to have her out of the picture for what happens later.

So Discord shows up again. (And has a song, though his voice actor - John De Lancie, also Q from Star Trek - kind of does the spoken-singing thing that Rex Harrison used to do). Discord is apparently ill. And needs someone to nurse him.

Pinkie Pie is immediately dismissed, despite her offer (she wanders off as a red balloon attracts her attention - a reference to the old, largely-wordless movie of the same name? Or that episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Dewey wanders off and winds up far from home because he was following a balloon?).

Applejack and Rarity apparently catch what Discord has, so they can't help. (I forget why Dashie couldn't do it...I suppose she refused; she seems to be one who remains most suspicious of Discord's "reform.")

So, apparently, it falls to Twilight to nurse Discord, even though her sister-in-law (Cadence/Cadance - remember her?) has made the trip to come for a day and spend the day with her.

One thing I have to note right here: Season 4 seems to be touching on some of my (sometimes half-remembered) childhood friend-issues. A big one occurred in this week's episode; last week's had Rainbow Dash trying to decide to stay with her (nerdy geeky non-athletic) friends or go sit at the popular ponies' table. (So to speak).

This week.....well, Discord does what I think is one of the awfullest, most passive-aggressive things I saw in a friendship as a kid. He's supposed to be sick, right? And he sends Cadence and Twilight on this dangerous mission to get this plant that allegedly can cure him. But it turns out he wasn't really sick. He was just testing Twilight to see if she was his friend. Or so he says.

I had something like that happen to me in grade school. A couple of my friends kind of ganged up on me and froze me out for a couple weeks. Ostensibly, they wanted me to choose which one of them I liked better and I said I couldn't do that. So I spend a couple of miserable weeks (it may have been less than that but it felt like it was about a month) agonizing over it. And I was a close-mouthed little kid and didn't feel like I could tell my parents what was going on - for one thing, it seemed so silly, and for another, I frankly wondered if it wasn't somehow my fault.

But anyway, at the end of the whole thing, when they wanted me to be pals with them again? The justification: "We were just testing you."

I'm sorry, what? As a kid - a kid desperate for friends and afraid of alienating anyone - I accepted that. But as an adult, I would probably have said something more along the lines of "Yeah, right. Come talk to me when you realize how hurtful the stuff you did was and when you are ready to apologize."

(I was dying for Twilight to go "DISCORD! Friends don't DO that to friends! Would Fluttershy do that to you? Would any of my pony friends do that to me? NO!"  But I guess Discord got his in the end, because he wound up getting sick for real...when Fluttershy had come back so she could be saddled with nursing him, I guess)

I'm not so sure about Discord's "reform" after this episode; he still seems pretty capable of expert level selfishness.

Anyway: I tweeted something about, "Am I the only one who had these kind of dysfunctional friend experiences as a kid, or is it pretty universal?" Sometimes I wonder if my tendency to be a bit of a loner and not be really comfortable opening up with many of my peers is a result of stuff that happened in school....that I learned that friendship is uncertain, and sometimes people who act like your friend are really using you, stuff like that. Apparently I'm not alone in my experience, but still...sometimes I wonder if I'd have an easier time trusting people if my childhood experience vis-a-vis peer interactions was more positive.

Another instant that made me cringe: the lead in to his song, where "all he wanted" was a glass of water, and then he proceeded to ask for the moon. I've had that happen to me as well - where I agree to do one little thing for a person and then wound up being run from pillar to post because they expect that if someone does one thing, they will do everything. Or they get irritated when you refuse. Or it's a power-situation and you don't feel that you can refuse.