An apology to Bill Decker and Muscatine school district

The season’s first snowfall arrived today at Brome Hill with a heaping order of crow.

When I woke up at 4 a.m., it was raining pretty hard. In fact, we had thunderstorms throughout the night here on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Without getting out of bed, I grabbed my phone and started reading my Twitter feed to find weather news.

And then I sent out this tweet:

Unfortunately, misspelling “cancelled” wasn’t my biggest mistake with this tweet, because the canceled winter storm warning was upgraded to a blizzard warning.

After I headed for the Muscatine Community Y to teach a cycling class, Bill Decker, the Muscatine superintendent of schools, responded with a tweet that I can’t find now in order to post it here. But according to the text message I received from Twitter it said:

“@CSteinbach, winter storm warning canceled because it was upgraded to a blizzard warning. Student safety>name calling #NotFunny. #NotClassy.”

Fair enough. And I apologize to Decker for jumping the gun with a tweet that was meant to be funny and fell short.

For what it’s worth, he got the last laugh without knowing it a few hours later when I was pelted by sleet as we loaded Christmas food baskets at the Salvation Army for 30-some MCSA residents.

The lessons learned from this experience for me are:

• School officials are often second-guessed for closing — or not closing — school when winter weather strikes. From here on out, however, I no longer plan to be among the second-guessers.
• Without a doubt, student safety should always be priority No. 1.
• Flippant tweets sent at 4:30 in the morning are best left to others. And the next time I feel the urge, I plan to roll over and go back to sleep.
• Crow isn’t very tasty, but it can be choked down if eaten with enough Sriracha sauce. (OK, no more jokes, I promise.)

As for my not being funny or lacking class, I’m not going to spend much time today worrying about such shortcomings. I’m going to be too busy shoveling snow.