We’re in week 2 of the Great Deluge, and while my nose has stopped dripping, our gutters are still clogged. All this rain means I haven’t gotten a damn thing done outside on the house, or with the Scout, or in the garden, which is driving me batshit crazy. However, while feeding Her Highness the other morning, I noticed that our neighborhood currently resembles Ireland in its lush, green, foggy beauty, and that’s not a bad thing. When we are slogging through another oppressive brown August, I’ll look back and remember how vibrant all the plants looked this spring before they had the life cooked out of them, and that will make me happy until I can crawl back into the air conditioning.

We enjoyed a wonderful meal Saturday evening with Mr. and Mrs. Scout, who are possibly the only people in Maryland to have actually managed to sell their house this year, within weeks of putting it on the market, and who will be leaving the ‘Ville to move across the Bay where the traffic is slower and the sky is sunnier. Mr. Scout promises me he will be back in the area regularly, but I suspect this means we will now have to settle for long-distance bromance.

I took the time last night, in front of a roaring fire, to finally wipe my MacBook clean and install a fresh new copy of Leopard, a full year after buying the install disc. I’ve noticed a huge speed gain already, as well as access to modern conveniences I should have been enjoying months ago. The last 12 hours have been a whirlwind of new installations and digging through discs to find long-forgotten files, but overall it’s great to have a clean system for the first time since 2004 (I’ve done user migrations since 10.2, and it was getting very, very crufty under the hood).

And finally, after a month of fruitless listings, untold numbers of flaky, half-legible emails, and three no-shows, I sold my sidelined G5 iMac this evening—for exactly what I paid for it a year and a half ago.