Sand Day

Well this is a first. I woke up this morning to an orange hue filling the room. As I went downstairs to get breakfast, every window looked bright orange. I opened the window and saw the haze, and smelled the dust and sand. We were in the middle of a sandstorm.

As I ate breakfast and got ready for work, a few friends who are also teachers started chatting with us. Similar to all of the experiences I had as a child growing up in NJ on a cold winter morning, we speculated as to weather or not school would be cancelled. In those days, it would be due to inches or feet of snow accumulating and making it dangerous for people to drive. For us, it was a heavy settling of sand and particles in the air making it unsafe for people to breathe; and unsafe to drive.

Good thing I had ordered some dust and sand masks a few weeks earlier that arrived the night before the storm. While I look like some gross between Hannibal Lecter, Bane, and a fighter pilot, it works. The mask even has vents that open and close like a fish's gills.

As we got ready the speculation continued. We collected stats as if we were preparing for our own argument that we all knew would never happen. "But most of the kids won't show up anyway. But the air quality is listed as hazardous. But it'll get in the windows of our rooms and infect us like a plague of grit." Then we got the email and the call. School was cancelled, well sort of. We would be holding class anyway, but on a distance learning method. Assignments and lesson plans had to be converted into an online method, and all of our correspondence electronic. Either way, it's a day inside with my wife, protected from the grime, and without a tie.