the mellow tigger's musings

Minneapolis seems to be in the lull before a storm. Our weather prediction includes, "WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 9 AM CST MONDAY" (emphasis in the original, scroll down to bottom). I see snow falling outside my bedroom window right now. That's good. The forecast was rain first, followed by snow, which would cause terrible ice conditions on sidewalks and roads for everyone. Only-snow is much better for everyone. It's still 2.5 hours until that noon arrival time.

I'm currently in between shifts of work today. Most people at the university have 1.5 weeks away from work. I, however, work on an "essential" team, so we have a skeleton crew during that time. We were actually and truly closed only on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. I volunteered for shifts on Friday, Saturday, and today. If nobody volunteers, then somebody gets told to work, which is unpleasant stuff for the holidays, so... I volunteered on several shifts that were still empty.

I'm supposed to do an annual review of my Bingo 2025 card. I planned on it. I'm not sure that's going to happen. The thing about this job, where I'm constantly asked questions for which I don't know answers but have to find them on short notice, is that I don't have mental bandwidth to spare for other stuff after the work day has ended. I haven't done my annual tax review in a few years, for instance. It requires more thinking that my tired brain wants to avoid in favor of not-thinking to recover stamina.

I'll still do a Bingo 2026 card, though. I find it very useful to avoid stressful topics for a year. I'll continue that practice. Maybe I'll write more on that idea tomorrow.

Normally, my team working on 40-50 tickets per hour is a respectable pace. About 2.5 years ago, during the semester start of the worst semester of workload at my job, we crossed 100 tickets per hour a few times. That experience was awful.

Today, I saw 85 tickets per hour once, and 70+ tickets per hour at 2 other times. That, plus we had about 1/3 of our full-time staff out for vacation or sick leave, so the workload was higher for those of us who remained. It was a very busy day.

I had other topics planned for Moody Monday discussion, but I don't have the mental bandwidth for it now. If I had any booze in the house, I'd be drinking it. I may still dress warm and walk to the store to buy some. Despite marijuana being legal in Minnesota for 3 years already, there's still no widespread deployment yet. Too bad, since if I had any edibles in the house, I'd be eating that too. This article talks about the slow rollout here, and it even mentions firefighters as another group of workers needing edibles to make their brains stop rehearsing the stressors of the day.

Just 24 hours ago, I knew exactly what I was going to write about today for Moody Monday. Now, though, so I've seen so many things that it's hard to choose what topic to mention.

Like the Amazon internet outage that took out much of the internet for most of the day, including where I work. My first tech support phone call this morning was from the main in-person test center on the biggest campus. They called to report that multiple students were unable to work on quizzes in multiple courses. I confirmed it wasn't just them, the images in exam questions weren't loading for me too. Within an hour, we knew just how widespread the problem was across the USA. Eventually, the entire Canvas website (used for coursework and quizzes) itself was down, affecting universities around the globe. At least we got a semi-funny picture from their Canvas website about the outage, pictured in this news article. Eventually, our phone system was also affected, with me losing a caller mid-sentence then unable to call them back. I had to take my lunch almost 2 hours early, during a period that phones were simply not operational, because we anticipated the rush of calls when we would need "all hands on deck" when service resumed later. It was a frustrating day.

Even more important to me than the estimated 100s of billions of dollars in lost productivity, however, is the attempted bombing of one gay ice cream store here in Minneapolis.

There's a paywalled news story here. Before the paywall kicks in, maybe you can read some of the context and see a photo of the giant flag hanging on the front of the building that probably prompted the attack. If you can't see the flag there, then you can view it here in Google Maps. More interesting, however, is an eyewitness to the second attack who took photos of the accused-offender's car to give to police. It's posted here on Bluesky.

I did advocate that people move to Minnesota from other areas, anticipating the violence that Republicans would unleash (more on that topic next Monday, maybe) with a second Trump term. I still maintain that it's safer here than elsewhere in the USA for queer folk. Wherever you are, stay safe out there.