We were supposed to get a light dusting of snow on Monday, starting in the late morning. Leaving my parents’ house Sunday night, I walked out into light freezing rain, just enough to make me expect a light freeze.

Earlier in the day, my brother had asked me if I could drive my niece to school in the morning. Not having any meetings until 9:30, I said sure.

I woke up to find over an inch of snow on the ground and more still coming down, but my street was still clear. By the time I was getting ready to leave to pick her up, I was checking for school closures. Many schools were closed or had two-hour delays, but not hers, so off I went, giving myself plenty of time to get there.

No trouble on the side streets, but as we were approaching a major messed-up intersection to make a double left turn, I felt the car start sliding on a sheet of ice. 30 years in California had dulled my winter-driving skills, but I still knew what to do, and guided the car to the curb without hitting anyone or going into a ditch (unlike at least half-a-dozen other people we’d passed since leaving my brother’s house). Then I slowly got the car moving again and got back into the lane. It gave my niece a little story for her friends at school.

The real fun was that it was still snowing when I got home half an hour later (rush-hour traffic was grindingly slow in the half-frozen slush), and I had to try to make it up my steep unshoveled 75-foot-long driveway. Surprisingly, I succeeded.

By late afternoon the sun and wind had completely cleared and dried the streets and driveways, but there’s still about an inch of the white stuff covering the yard. That will all go away as it goes back up to 50°F by Wednesday afternoon.

Santa’s Little Helpers

Keeping with the tiny-gals-in-snow theme, I asked a few elves to make me a scale model of a caffeine molecule. They weren’t quite clear on the concept:

I even went widescreen to give them more room to make a complex molecule. It didn’t help:

Then I made the mistake of asking some dwarves to provide basic chemistry lessons:

(I was tinkering up an entry for the SwarmUI Discord’s daily theme contest; I started with the gals, but decided to go fully SFW and use the dwarves instead)

Meanwhile, in Amazon Logistics

They’re still pretending that the item that went back to the depot on Friday afternoon and hasn’t moved since will be delivered by tomorrow. So they can hang onto my money for another day before starting to process a refund.

Erased!

I don’t recognize young actress Maya Imamori, and after she was caught taking a drink four months before turning 20, neither will anyone else. I can’t decide which I’d prefer: Japan cutting back on the way it polices entertainer morality and makes performers grovel, or Hollywood adopting the practice.

More precisely, Hollywood introducing the concept of shame. They already have shunning, just for the wrong reasons.

“Enough with the virgins already!”

I never thought it would happen to me, but there it was: I was sick of virgins.

Let me explain. There’s this thing about fantasy fiction, one of those whatayacallit “tropes’, where a kingdom is being ravaged by a dragon (livestock eaten, crops burned, you know the drill) and somebody gets the bright idea that the solution is to find a reasonably-healthy village girl who hasn’t played hide-the-sausage with the butcher’s son, put her in a flowing white dress, and chain her up somewhere she’ll be easy to spot when the dragon makes his next flash-fried-mutton run.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work. Why not? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you’ve got a dragon problem. Every few days it launches itself into the air, flies around your villages looking for tasty livestock, swoops down, grabs a few, and heads home for dinner. Don’t get fussy about the ratio of calories burned to calories earned for the moment. It’s a dragon; there’s magic involved, okay?

Given that a decent-sized dragon can carry off an adult male sheep in each hand, er “taloned forepaw”, that’s what, 500 pounds of meat, fat, and bone, at least twice a week? Average weight of a virgin sacrifice? 80 pounds, soaking wet. This is because unless she’s seriously sickly or ugly, village girls stop being virgins around the age of twelve. Thirteen if the local boys are a little slow on the draw.

Even if you assumed that virgins were the tastiest morsels around, they’d barely be a light snack for a creature that can eat two sheep and be hungry again three days later. And if they were that tasty, he’d be back for another one the next day, and it’s not like they grow on trees.

So what are we, and yes I mean “we”, supposed to do with all those virgins? You can’t just leave them there to die from exposure; those dresses wouldn’t stand up to a stiff breeze, and it gets cold in the mountains at night. And let’s be honest, if somebody wanted them back, they’d be rescued; people don’t sacrifice sweet-tempered girls with prospects, they get rid of the annoying ones who ask too many questions and refuse to fit in. Y’know, the clever girls.

Anyway, that’s how I started a school for witches.

(file under annoying that I had to specify that the dragon had two wings, one on each side; Qwen has a habit of just not drawing limbs on the off side, triggering variation renders when I like a pic but can’t plausibly believe that the second arm/leg/wing is hidden behind the body. Also, there were size issues; it really wants to fit the entire dragon body into the frame while rendering the girls at a decent size, so in about two-thirds of my attempts, he was small enough that a little girl would make a filling meal)

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