There’s that old line about how the indiginous people of Alaska have a lot of words for snow (and also the rebuttal saying that is not true). As someone from Schenectady, I felt like I knew a lot of different words for frozen precipitation. Of course there is snow, which is recognized by the hexagonal symmetry of the flakes. But as someone who has endured more than her fair share of winters in upstate New York and in New Hampshire, I also know the difference between ice pellets, sleet, and freezing rain. Hail is a summertime frozen precipitation that evolved separately from the others.

So I find it somewhat ironic that I did not learn about graupel until living in San Diego, where there has not been measurable snowfall since before I was born. I don’t even know if graupel has a verb form. Since as a native speaker I have great leeway for changing the English language, I’m going to say that it graupelled yesterday in San Diego. Graupel is slushier than sleet, but it still bounces when it hits pavement. Needless to say, I did not drive on any of the local freeways while it was graupelling because that would have been really stupid. People here can’t even drive in the rain; imagine what it would be like with some sort of esoteric frozen precipitation.

Sorry for the relative silence here, but I have been dealing with work-stuff that is challenging in the not-particularly-interesting way. The current project is limited by the infrastructure to exactly three tools, SQL, JavaScript, and React, and none of them are particularly well-suited for the work that I’m doing. Also, I didn’t know anything about React before starting this project, so that doesn’t help. Even worse, the tables storing the data are ginormous, and even the most straightforward queries take several seconds to run (which is too slow for a production server). And JavaScript was not designed to deal with manipulating and analyzing large datasets. But once it’s done, the dashboard is going to be nifty and pretty?