Hopefully most of you follow the Twitter account and Facebook page and caught my earlier note about double-checking to see if the events scheduled for this week were still happening. I try my best to update the actual LOVIEE for events that get cancelled after I post. However, I am not always successful.

Beyond a couple of things, I’m not sure what got cancelled and what went on as planned. I only briefly had time to attempt to contact Walter’s on Washington tonight (regarding the Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights/Truth & Salvage Co/Placid Blue show, 11-W06-1), and nobody answered the phone at the time I called. In the absence of any announcement that the show was cancelled I can only assume it went on as scheduled. I only knew of one Snowman Poker League (Z-SMP) venue cancelling their Friday night game (Gulf Greyhound Park) and the league’s owners did send an email blast out to existing players with an email address on file.

That leaves three ongoing exhibits (I Shot Rock, syntaxerrors, and Parody of Light), which there’s still plenty of time to catch, and the 2600 Magazine meeting (Z-14), which is informal enough not to have a central contact point.

This happened last year as well around this time, so I’ll just summarize with three points:

• If you are running an event and need to cancel due to inclement weather, get the word out as soon as you know you’re cancelling. If you’re in charge of the venue, and it is at all possible, have someone or something answering the phone, even if it’s an answering machine in greeting only mode saying something along the lines of: “Thank you for calling the Brand X Club. Tonight’s show featuring the Solar Flares and Metal Mouths has been cancelled due to the inclement weather and will be rescheduled for sometime in the spring. If you bought advance tickets from StubBlubber contact them for a refund.” You get the idea… Of course, there are cases where that is impossible (e.g., power outage of length that happens 10 minutes before doors open).
• If you are planning to attend an event and the weather’s looking really bad, double-check before leaving if possible if you have any doubt the event is still going on. (Area schools cancelling after-school activities, even if not the actual classes themselves, should be enough to trigger a double-check.) Check the websites, Twitter account and/or Facebook page for the venue and the performers, or if you can’t find those, there’s always the phone. (Voice, not text.)
• It never hurts to have a backup plan, bad weather or not; many other things can happen to cause a show or event not to go on as scheduled.

Hopefully spring will be here soon. The groundhog has been wrong before, though.