The heat wave blues
Bleah. It’s hot! It’s been hot ever since I got back from Richland last Friday, but at least it was cooling off at night. No more… Starting Monday it got hot and just stayed hot – over 90 most of the time in the house. Yesterday the high was 105 and last night the “low” was 70 degrees. While some of you in hot climates may not think much of this, keep in mind that most of us in the Pacific NW don’t have any form of air conditioning – my house is 10-15 degrees warmer than the outdoors once this gets going. With skylights, high ceilings, and south-facing windows, there is not much hope for me.
Yesterday afternoon I started to feel that inevitable heat migraine coming on, so I finally gave up and went to a hotel. I felt sorry for my cat, who was sprawled out listlessly on the tile floor and looking at me like, “is it night-time yet”? The next two days are supposed to be hotter still – then we may get a “break” to 85 – which will no doubt feel quite cool by then. I came in this morning to check on things and have my couple hours on the computer before it gets too hot and they have to be shut down – only to find that to add insult to injury, my fan apparently shorted out during the night.
If there was ever any debate about whether I should fork over the cash for installing AC, my doubts are over. I’ve got tons of work to do this week, and most of it’s going to be at least a couple days late. As if to emphasize that I made the right decision, Newsweek ran an article on “things you don’t want to hear from climate scientists” discussing the latest bad news from the science front – turns out the models, rather than being alarmist, are actually underestimating the rate of change. Add to that the latest photos released by the US government showing the loss of polar ice and glaciers in various places, and I’m beginning to think it was a very good investment indeed. Now all we need is thin-film solar to power all the AC we’re going to need just to survive.
I miss the Seattle of my youth. The climate was much more temperate then – days below freezing in the winter and days above 80 in the summer were rare. (Lest you think this is just my childhood rose-colored glasses, I actually checked my recollection out with a UW meteorologist.) Contrast that to 2 feet of snow and temperatures in the teens this winter and 90+ weeks in May, July, and I am sure, August this summer and things have really changed. I can only hope this doesn’t become a distant memory for all of us.
100 Book meme
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Copy this into your journal. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.
1 Pride and Prejudice – x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – x
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – x
6 The Bible – x
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – x
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens -x
10/10
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – x
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – x
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger -x
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – x
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – x
18/20
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – x
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – x
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – x
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – x
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
25/30
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – x
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – x
34 Emma – Jane Austen – x
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – x
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – x
33/40
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – x
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – x
39/50
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – x
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – x
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – x
43/60
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – x
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – x
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – x
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – x
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
47/70
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – x
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – x
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante – x
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – x
80 Possession – AS Byatt – x
53/80
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – x
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – x
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – x
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
59/90
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – x
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – x
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – x
65/100~! So much for the BBC :) But now I have a new list of interesting books to look up.
That travel bug
I’ve been reading Eat, Pray, Love … finally. Probably everyone else has read it already, but it was given to me a while ago by a friend and I just now got around to it. It might have been the “pray” part – I wasn’t sure what that meant. But I was immediately captivated by the author’s writing style, her ability to comment on and analyze herself, and her observations of other cultures. Even the praying part was acceptable and interesting!
Not to mention that her life story, as told in this book, is arguably very similar to my recent story, which is no doubt why my friend thought of it for me. I too had the divorce, the mad love affair, the bouts of depression and the ultimate need for independence and finding myself, perhaps recreating myself, out of the broken pieces. Not quite as dramatically (I hope) but then, she is a writer ;)
Reading it, though, definitely raised that old travel bug in me. And not just any travel bug, but the need to actually live in other cultures, be a real part of the place you’re visiting. She spends 4 months each in Italy, India, and Bali. I was relieved to read that Italy actually has changed toward female tourists since I was there last, public displays of groping, stalking, and otherwise excessive behavior no longer quite as intolerable as before. Maybe I’ll decide to visit now :)
The idea of just picking up, going to a new country, finding a place to live and staying there a while really appeals to me. After a while, choosing a new destination and living there for a while, all the while supporting myself with online work that has now grown to the point that I could easily support myself most of the places I would choose to visit. The ultimate fantasy would be to have someone to do this with, which would both increase the pleasure and decrease the cost. I’d probably do it either way, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you have to live your life and not wait for the perfect set of circumstances.
It’s been so hot in my house recently, and working at home makes it doubly hard. I’ve been thinking about getting a heat pump. But always in the back of my mind there’s that thought that I really won’t be here long and shouldn’t make any more expensive renovations than I already have. I’ll stay as long as my grandfather is alive, that much is certain. And perhaps it would make sense to keep the house and rent it while I’m doing whatever I’m doing wherever in the world – that way I’ll have a place to come back to should I ever need it, or just want to rest from my travels. In which case, I should buy that heat pump. Besides, who knows what the future will bring. At least I’ll have a cool house!
Happiness is…
It’s a good week when…
- I get to visit with my family (including far-away relatives) and two of my best friends all in one week
- I received cool new bird and mammal guides to New Zealand and Antartica allowing me to further daydream about my upcoming vacation (even if it is 6 months away)
- The local potter called to say she made the salad bowl I asked her to make months and months ago in my favorite color and design and was not sure when/if she’d get around to it (I bump into her at the farmer’s market and have a bunch of her other stuff, and didn’t want to rush it)
- The weather is alternatively warm and lovely and rainy, and things are growing well in the garden – my first peppers and broccoli appearing
- I got a new netbook to play with that is tiny and will be so much more reasonable to carry on trips, just in time for my upcoming week at Hanford
- I get lots of work done, some of it even fun, but it’s really the last thing on my mind
- I lost a few pounds and someone noticed :)
RSS - Posts