thew eakin' re: few

Yesterday it was 22C when I rose (>70F), which meant we could only cool the house with open doors for a short time. One measure of real summer in Alabama is that, at 6:30 in the morning, it's already hotter outside than you want to be inside. This morning it was 23° C. And so it goes. The air is relatively dry, for these parts, which meant that when the sun dipped below the horizon last evening it instantly felt much cooler. We savored it by discussing right-wing politics with our carpenter. He seems to actively enjoy survivalist and tea party rants by neighbors and other people he encounters in the community. Lucky him!

What did I do yesterday. I don't really know. I did work on a short story that is now, at 4200 words, one of the longest I have ever written. No end in sight. It began as a straightforward Lovecraftian piece. I became unsatisfied with the original goal of the story, but I don't have a better one to replace it with yet. Uh-oh.

I am reading Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link. This is one of the seven or eight books that [spouse] bought at ICFA in Orlando this past March. I didn't buy any books there, but so far I have enjoyed everything she bought. This one is a short story collection, which is unusual. She generally prefers novels. Before that I read Fair Game by Patricia Briggs. This is the latest in her series about werewolves. A good read, but it was obvious from a point early in the story who the bad guy was. In between I read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. A YA novel about fighting back against “the man” in a high-tech near future dystopia. Very well done, although I think he explained more than he really needed to. Also, I think the bad guys were unrealistically competent. I think. So that's my reading for the past week or so.

Too busy for social media at work. Busy at work because I have now spent two weeks working on a poster that I will present in one week in Houston. Making graphics seems to take forever, and that's mostly what I have been doing. Tomorrow I better start putting the poster together so I can find out what I still need to make. It is about a fossil mound, which is like a reef without the rigid framework. The mound was built by sponges and microbes in relatively shallow water in North Alabama about 325 million years ago. It is in a formation that has multiple examples of a quite different sort of mound in Kentucky, but nothing at all similar has been found in Alabama. So that's kind of cool.

Already 27C as I post this.