This was a good idea that bore much fruit:
you don’t have to be in blizzard territory to play but please text your dad for advice about the weather and share his response
— Mallory Ortberg (@mallelis) January 26, 2015
Here are some highlights. Please feel free to replace “dad” with “closest non-dad union equivalent” wherever necessary.
.@mallelis “Start the car every two hours so you know it will still start.” All night? “Yes, all night.”
— C.M. Stone (@CeeEmStone) January 26, 2015
@mallelis “hi!!!!! why you don’t call me? have you made appointment for dentist” [a second text, a minute later] “go patriots”
— TIGER MILLIONAIRE (@somersaulthippo) January 26, 2015
@mallelis I live in California and he’s asking me if we’re getting any of it.
— ReginaldConwayIII (@ReginaldConway) January 26, 2015
@mallelis “be sure to get a loaf of bread and a quart of milk…if you can find any left. And cancel your dinner with grandma tomorrow night”
— Sam Hockley-Smith (@shockleysmith) January 26, 2015
@mallelis My dad responded to my blizzard msg by complaining that his pool in Palm Springs was too cold.
— Kelly Rowland (@kellrowland) January 26, 2015
@mallelis “you don’t have a job just stay home”
— sarah, plain & tall (@geekylonglegs) January 26, 2015
@mallelis Followup a min ago: “I just checked your weather & it’s sunny. Why are you texting me for advice? Go outside like I raised you.”
— Jinxx the Rogue (@jinxxtherogue) January 26, 2015
@mallelis he rang to ask if I’d found the de-icer he’d stashed in my car when I was last home, which brings my de-icer collection to 8 cans.
— Diphthong Song (@Flossieraptor) January 26, 2015
@mallelis my dad is a prolific tweeter in Connecticut so you can see for yourself @Bill1550
— Alex Hart (@alexandrahart) January 27, 2015
Dads are a precious national resource and must be carefully protected for future generations. Text a dad today.
Since my dad works in public safety, I’m 100% sure his advice in this situation would involve a crank-powered radio, backpacks filled with spare clothes in case there’s an unexpected evacuation order, battery-operated carbon monoxide detectors, and at least six litres of bottled water per person.
My father has Red Cross disaster-preparedness training, of which he is of course very aware, and his invariable weather advice is that an unforgivable amount of damage in the wake of disasters come from over-eager people and their bloody candles setting things on fire; if it’s dark, just go to sleep; the world is full of people with neither electricity or candles.
I’m in eastern Mass and we have drifts up to four feet high out there. The dad next door (not my personal dad) reminded me to check the vents coming out of my house… specifically the vent FROM THE GAS FURNACE. Yikes. Seriously, I wouldn’t have thought of it.
“@mallelis Followup a min ago: “I just checked your weather & it’s sunny. Why are you texting me for advice? Go outside like I raised you.”
— Jinxx the Rogue (@jinxxtherogue) January 26, 2015″
This is every male relative I have. My father also believed that if we were sick all we really needed to do was go outside and do some chores to overcome it regardless of symptoms.
“Dishwater up to the elbows” is my mom’s favorite remedy.
Did our dads receive the same medical training somewhere? Mine once made me go outside and help carry wood because I had a stiff neck.
I had a doctor once tell me, “You have bronchitis. I recommend spending some time outside in the sun.” Okay, then! No problem with patient compliance on that one.
My dad is in Florida and I live out west and he still brought up the blizzard. “It’s the storm of the century!!”
“Go and shovel then.”
My dad always finds joy in hard labour.
My dad replied with “so sorry” and a photo of him currently at the beach.
The Palm Springs one made me spit out coffee. DADS.
My Dad doesn’t know how to text, but my favorite coworker came up to me first thing in the morning and asked if I had kitty litter in my car. Then she made me drive around with her in the parking lot in low gear. And gave me a bag of kitty litter to store in my trunk. I guess she’s my work Dad now.
I used to complain about my lack of work wife while solo bartending in an old man bar, but I just realized I have so many “work dads”.
I have a fabulous Work Dad, but I am contemplating changing jobs, and my biggest concern is the disappointed look he’ll give me when I tell him. I told him I needed a new laptop and he sent me links to 9 good options and forwarded an email coupon.
No work dad, but I have a great work mom! and a crazy work uncle I try to avoid :-/
Kitty litter! My dad taught me to always carry it in the car in winter. My husband grew up in an area with less snow and was always skeptical of me and my kitty litter. But it works!
I once single handedly got our elderly neighbor’s car unstuck in our back alley using nothing but kitty litter and common sense. I was proud – I called my dad to thank him for teaching me about kitty litter.
Also, the extra weight can help with traction, if you have a small car.
Last time my parents came to visit me, they had a 40-lb carton of kitty litter in the trunk, because the car’s developed a weird squeak in the back that only goes away if you have something weighing down the back end of the car. Travel gear usually does it, but they have 40# of kitty litter as backup.
My parents are united in dad-ness.
Can I have this colleague too?
I’m so jealous of all these people who get to text their dads. Despite countless attempts to teach him, my dad just can’t figure out texting. Here’s a typical message from him: “Nan I’m trying to figure out texting let me know if u get this dad” Here’s the next one: “J”
“J” is something I see sometimes when people make a smiley face 🙂 and their phone converts it to some graphic emoji. I guess it gets confused when it gets translated back to text/onto another phone platform/etc.?
Awwww, that’s a lovely thought. In this case, though, it was definitely just a ‘J’. Apparently he’s been having trouble with accidentally hitting the send button.
J is the smiley face in the Wingdings font — if you make a smiley in Outlook for instance, that’s what it changes it to. So if you don’t have Wingdings on whatever device, you get J instead of :). (L is the frowny face, if you ever see that.)
My dad doesn’t even have a cell phone. He will never have a cell phone.
That said, a former boyfriend once borrowed my phone while I was out of town and his texts read much like that except he couldn’t find the space key.
I thought my dad was calling me last night because my mom is out of town and he gets super lonely when she’s away, but instead he just grilled me about what I would do if the power went out (“do you have enough food? do you have candles?”) and then hurried me off the phone because his spaghetti was ready.
My “dad” is a lady younger than I am who gives advice about proper shoveling technique, and crockpot recipes. Everybody needs some kind of dad.
Be the dad you wish to see in the world.
In my case it would be my mom I’d text for weather advice. I live a state away from her, but I always hear about what the weather in my area is going to be doing from her, because she’s constantly checking it online and calling or texting me if there’s even the slightest chance of snow, ice, or rain.
My dad and I had our twelfth round of our shovel debate this weekend and after that I can’t bear to have another winter weather conversation with him.
Dad: You need to keep this heavy duty shovel!
Me: Nope, I live in an apartment where they plow the parking lots and sidewalks regularly.
Dad: But they could plow you in!
Me: I have a smaller shovel in my trunk that you gave me for just that purpose!
Dad: But you never know!
Me: I’ve lived here for three winters and I’ve never needed it!
Dad: You need it!
Me: My roommate dropped it on her foot and the METAL BLADE on the edge cut her!
Dad: Well what did she do that for?
The shovel is still here.
I grew up somewhere snowier than I am now and my dad still lives there, so he is not a giver of hyperbolic weather advice. We hail from lake effect country, where big snows are common enough that no one panics. That said, he would be deeply ashamed of the half inch of snow on my sidewalk right now, because he has a fanatical devotion to shoveling or otherwise clearing all snow-accumulating surfaces before walking on them, which he mostly passed on to me except fuck a half inch when I need to get to work.
Oh, Michigan dads <3
Not gonna lie, pretty happy to see mine here. Also, as a coda, not only am I not in blizzard territory, I’m in the UK where’s it not even cold right now. My dad is just very keen that weather conditions thousands of miles away shouldn’t affect me.
When I was in Berlin doing dissertation research, the first thing my dad would ask me on the phone was, “What’s it doing there?” That Christmas I got him a coffee-table book on extreme weather as a gag gift. He LOVED it.
My dad went into a long rambling Dad Story about the last time the Northeast was this cold. Apparently he walked to work on a frozen-over Lake Ontario or some such nonsense.
YES uphill both ways, so why can’t you go to work?
Canada, Buffalo, Rochester, or North Country? Going to his job as an ice fisherman? Lol.
Well, Toronto IS only a 90-mile walk from Rochester if you cut across the lake…
If I had talked to my dad on a blizzard day he would probably have had no advice and instead tried to tell me about the hot new band he saw on late night TV or asked me for the thousandth time if I was the one who liked Sufjan Stevens (“No dad, that was one of your other children, and she doesn’t even like him anymore”). May he rest in peace.
My mom invited us to her house if we lost power – she’s half an hour away by highways. I told her that we have underground utilities and gas heat so we’ll be all right. She verified this with my stepdad, texted me that he said we were probably in the clear, and then invited us to come over if we “just want to hang out :)”
…we got the predicted 2+ feet. My car is buried to the windows. Not plowed in. Just snow.
I think we’ll stay here, Mom.
We live far from blizzard country, but the last time I went to my childhood home I discovered that for the past 20 years, we’ve been receiving mass mailings about what to do if the nuclear power plant melts down, and that my dad has never read them.
are you from Eastern Washington? Because my dad is, and if he got an email like that he’d probably say “pffft, I swam in that river when they used to dump all the radioactive shit in it, I’m probably inoculated!”
When I moved from Upstate NY to the Midwest, I nearly shit a brick the when I heard the county test the tornado sirens for the first time. Where I come from, the sirens mean Ginna has melted down and we’re all about to sizzle.
No dadtwitter, but “@mallelis “be sure to get a loaf of bread and a quart of milk…if you can find any left.” must be standard weather advice for people of a certain age. Grandma if I’m going to be snowed in I’d get something better than milk and bread to subside on.
There is no better food for being snowed in than cinnamon toast and hot cocoa. Well…
Possibly there is. Share your foods with me? I am totally down for hearing a list of things that are amazing to eat while snowed in.
You know, I didn’t even think about cocoa! As far as snowed-in foods, I love nice cheesy polenta – so easy to make and full of warm cheesy, carby goodness. That or some yummy multi-bean soup…my old roomate had a recipe for it that made a great vegetarian stew, and it’s such a cozy meal.
And if the power goes out, I just work through the cheese and veggies in the fridge, lol.
It’s almost 70* here and sunnier skies have never been seen, but I’m absolutely going to make polenta tonight. Mmmm. Oh, and broil some Brussels sprouts, too.
Eating all the ice cream in the freezer is my favourite, when the power goes out. That and stove-top popcorn. Awwww yesss.
Seriously… maybe it’s left over from when people used to buy fresh bread and it went stale really quickly? I get the milk, but what’s with all the bread? There are so many other things to eat first if the power goes off. Plus, gas stoves.
We are snowed in, and I made a lamb stew with walnut-and-pomegranate sauce last night, and tonight will probably be nice hot rigatoni + red wine…
I had never heard this until I moved to the Northeast. (And I come from the northern Midwest, where blizzards are hardly unheard of.)
My parents do steak and grilled pizza when the electricity goes out. Once they were in the grocery store before a storm and they had steak and mozzarella cheese and all sorts of great vegetables in their cart and the woman behind them had a cart literally full of bread and milk.
One of my mom’s favorite stories from when she was a kid was when Syracuse got hit with a massive blizzard in 1966. It drifted to the tops of telephone poles and kids just dug tunnels to get around instead of trying to walk on top of it.
Needless to say, her only advice to me was to make sure I had beer.
My boyfriend, who is quite a bit older than me, keeps calling me up to talk about the weather. It’s really weirding me out after seeing all these posts .
“There were four inches on the ground when I left. Your mother is snowed in. I am in Pasadena.”
My dad texted me yesterday to ask if I’d be getting any of the blizzard weather and what preparations I’d done. I live in Oregon.
I live in Oregon, now, too. My dad asks me about the rain on a weekly basis, and when I moved, in all seriousness: “do they even have seafood there?”
We are from the Gulf Coast, obvs.
I mean, in fairness, what Oregonians refer to as a “shrimp” is clearly some kind of joke.
I confess a new love for halibut cheeks in my court bouillion: https://louisiana.kitchenandculture.com/recipes/b…
the varieties of salmon are also…interesting, although kinda fishy. I make a thin sorta lemon aioli and broil them.
Smoked salmon is only palatable when pretending I am Julie of The Wolves.
But the dungeness crabs, though! I did the reverse-move (from Oregon to the Atlantic coast) and was *deeply* confused the first time I went to a crab boil and had people ask me how many I wanted to start with. One crab is the size of a primoridial sea monster and will feed a family of four! What do you mean, “how many”…
I also miss the salmon coming in varieties, although really, the whole nation is basically/probably should be just eating Alaskan-caught stuff these days.
my adopted friend-fam are fisherfolk, so the season is upon them for steelhead and coho and whatever the heck. I like it! Just like many wild foods, it takes getting used to.
They fed me cougar (!!!!!!!) the other night and thought it was hilarious to freak out the Louisiana girl. I WILL GET YOU OREGONIANS.
Also, depending on where on the coasts you are, steam vs boil for those teeny blue crab. The ones that look like the US Capitol are female, the ones that look like the Washington Monument are jimmies.
My Dad thinks that texting is a way for unspecified people to steal your identity. But he did call to ask about the snow, “is it still coming down” (yes, it’s a blizzard), and ‘Did your mother really tell you to go stock up on groceries. I think you have enough brain to know to that on your own” (I do, but my mother is a capitol M mom).
He wanted me to faccetime him so he could see the snow but,”your mother broke the iPad again” which means that she keeps changing her apple password because she doesn’t want my Dad reading her emails (he’s insulted that she thinks he’d snoop, and she’s worried that he’ll accidentally find out about his birthday trip) and then forgetting it.
Your parents are so cute <3
my dad would be useless for weather advice. we live in california, though, so.
my dad is the kind of dad who grumpalumps around the house, saying “it’s cold!” before my mom or i tell him, exasperatedly, to put on a sweater.
My dad does the same thing! If it’s that cold, why are you sitting around in short sleeves? Honestly. And I tell him to put on a sweater if he’s that cold, but he inevitably just continues to sit there bitching. Dads.
I thought the whole Jimmy Carter thing had established that putting on a sweater was downright un-American, and that the answer is always to turn the thermostat up.
It’s about three board feet, or a third of a garn. (in other words, I don’t use either quarts or pints so I’m useless here).
I am the useless-winter-advice-giver in the family, so there’s no point in texting my dad who would probably just tell me “if you get hungry eat the cat”
eating/beating the pets seems to be a Dad thing, for dads who would never even dream of either.
My dad makes my mom take out the mouse traps, you should see what happens when they get a nutria or a snake in the yard, it’s a start to petting zoo is all I’m sayin
Yes, my dad regularly and loudly talks about how much he hates their stupid dogs, then sits on the couch petting them and talking to them for an hour.
“you have ZERO friends on Facebook”, says my dad to my dogs while scritching their ears, “NOBODY likes YOU at ALL”, *scritch scritch scritch”.
My Dad was very reasonable about it:
Dad: How bad is it. Mom said they were forecasting lots of snow.
Me: Not much, a couple inches. [my University] is closed though!
Dad: Can you wait it out? Enough food? You have good boots?
Then he proceeded to ask whether I’d talked to my mother recently, to keep them updated, and just how I was in general. To be fair, he grew up in a place that gets a fair amount of snow, and lives in a place that generally gets more snow than I do now.
OMG this Bill Hart guy is a dad dream-boat, for real.
(I can’t complain, my dad looks a lot like Donald Sutherland, and builds robots. About Jian Ghomeshi he said “I can’t understand this. Why would he be into this kind of thing? I would understand if he, say, were really into spaceships.”)
my dad will report in on the weather, and the crime, for every city I’ve ever lived in (five and counting), and critique them against one another.
My late dad’s advice would have been offered in the spirit of commiseration, hedged ’round with assurances that he knows I don’t need advice…
He would be very proud of me for having everything charged up and the kitchen stocked, for making sure I know how to safely restart the heater if the storm blocks the vent (as it did during our last blizzard), and especially for taking advantage of this day to fiiiiiinally close the storm window that sits behind a massive bookcase in our front room, which required me to empty the heavy shelves, take them down one by one, wrestle the window open and the storm window closed, then re-construct the bookcase and fill it up again.
My dad is much more of an e-mailer, and he already had this covered. He emailed me a week ago to let me know that the weather channel said there would be lots of snow in my area and to “So stock up on foodstuffs and stay inside and warm”. And then he followed up yesterday saying he hoped I was stocking up on “food and stuff”.
food/stuff/foodstuffs, just make sure you don’t starve and have stuff, stuff you might need, maybe, is what he’s saying.
My mom IMed me to check that we had enough cat food, and to ask whether my work had closed.
My dad posted a picture to facebook of him with a tape measure in a snow bank, showing that they got just under a foot of snow.
that’s so parent.
Not snowstorm-related but storm-related: there was a period of time (about 6 months long) where every single phone conversation with my parents mentioned power strips.
… I should probably buy a power strip.
Guys! Guys! I need to share some awesomeness!!
A friend just sent me this: http://imgur.com/a/n0wEv
It is a thing of beauty and also a thing about DADS
😀
My parents do steak and grilled pizza when the electricity goes out. Once they were in the grocery store before a storm and they had steak and mozzarella cheese and all sorts of great vegetables in their cart and the woman behind them had a cart literally full of bread and milk.
That sounds like my kind of winter – sign me up!
YOU CAN HAVE IT
I'm betting folks in Cheektowaga are nearly spraining their orbitals rolling their eyes at Boston right now.
Weird Converter can help with that. It can also tell you how many human eyeballs you'd need to weigh as much as one Jennifer Aniston.
I actually went to go stay with my Dad, who proceeded to make a little safe area for my chinchilla to play in and made sure to check on him often, cleaned off my car for me, and before I left to come back home he said that he was very happy I’d come to stay even if we didn’t get as much snow as we were expecting.
He even pet my chinchilla and I don’t think he’d ever done that before. #TeamDads
I actually went to go stay with my Dad, who proceeded to make a little safe area for my chinchilla to play in and made sure to check on him often, cleaned off my car for me, and before I left to come back home he said that he was very happy I'd come to stay even if we didn't get as much snow as we were expecting.
He even pet my chinchilla and I don't think he'd ever done that before. #TeamDads
I sent my mother a picture of the snow fall at 9:30 this morning (28ish inches). She just called me to ask if I was shoveled out yet. No. Because that was 15 minutes ago, and as you can clearly see on skype, I’m wearing pajamas and drinking coffee