so ... hot dammit

It’s a little after midnight and it’s still 83 degrees, with the dewpoint a nasty 74. I’m fine as long as I don’t move. Earlier today it was in the 90s! Last night (Friday night), there was a wild storm, a movie storm, that lasted about an hour, dumping nearly two inches of badly needed rain. Movie lightning! We loved it, but the dog was a quivering mass of fear. I thought the cat was scared also since he jumped out of his window really fast, but it just turned out it was the rain coming in that pissed him off. But the storm did nothing to cool things off.

We’re going on vacation next Saturday, so I have all these plans. Today I wanted to weed the garden again. And I want to really clean the house so it’s not so depressing to get back to our usual “getting- ready- to- go- away” messiness (plus so it won’t gross out the person taking care of the house). But it is just - too - hot. (We only have an air conditioner in the bedroom—mainly because a/c bothers me most of the time.) And, of course, there’s a lot of work stuff I want to catch up on.

So, today, instead of doing anything productive, I went to a farmer’s market with Helene, and then to Wild Oats for a very late lunch, did a tiny bit of work when I got home, and puttered around doing mainly nothing but watching a truly awful movie with Stanley (Alien Express, with Lou Diamond Phillips, renamed from Dead Rail). Oh the movie stank. I have yet to see a movie billed as a SciFi original that didn’t stink. There’s two hours of my life I will never get back.

My new plan is to (still) clean the house, but the garden can wait until I get back (it’s been growing like mad in all this heat and humidity). And I would like to be completely packed by the day before we go, instead of the morning we leave. We already got the car attended to (yet another Focus recall had to be dealt with) ...

Speaking of the car, Ford Motor Company ripped us off yet again. Never, and I repeat never, get a Ford Focus. This time, it turned out that the license plate light was gone—housing rusted away. Needed replacing. “What?” said I when Alonso of McMahon Ford called with the good news. “But the car is less than four years old—how could a part completely rust out?” Seems Ford issued a service advisory on it a while ago, but neglected to let anyone such as, say, an OWNER know this was a problem. A small part that, as it turned out, I could have replaced (or more likely, Stanley would have) instead of paying Ford $150 to do it. And of course, Ford wouldn’t pay for it.

Anyway, back to my plan. There are at least two sites that I want to have launch-ready by Friday. And my external hard drive should be here some time on Tuesday, so I can back everything up before we go (shoulda done this last year, but ... ) And a lot of odds and ends I need to wrap up but, truth be told, I will probably have time to get about half of them done.

Oh, and billing to do. And bookkeeping. I wish we could really go away and not have to work at all, but we won’t be able to this year. Not that we’ll put in THAT much time, but ...

I am so looking forward to this vacation. I still haven’t recovered from the stress of February and March. I can’t wait to see Mom and Dad. And my sibs are planning on throwing us a wedding party, which we’re looking forward to just so we can see everyone again. Even though we’ll be in Michigan for about three weeks, it’s never enough time.

Stanley is counting the minutes. He is swamped with work this week as everyone tries to get things done before he leaves rather than waiting until he gets back. Everything is urgent all of a sudden.

No matter. Come Saturday morning, we’re on the road, listening to the latest Harry Potter (the CD arrived weeks ago!), talking without being interrupted by anything ... I love traveling with Stanley.

I bet this heat wave breaks next Saturday, say about 10:00 am.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/13/05 at 08:25 PM
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