The house is quiet. The kids are watching some TV while the adults wake up slowly in the living room. We’re all sunburned and sleepy from yesterday’s four-hour beach time. The weather has been brutally hot and humid since before last week, and it included the coast of Delaware. There was also no wind to speak of, so the horseflies swarmed us unless we were in the water (our panicked escape from the beach back to the house must have been hilarious to anyone watching from the neighboring houses). Monday wasn’t as bad as Sunday, though, and the water was cool and refreshing.
Our house is spacious and modern, and we’ve all got enough room to move and not be on top of each other. While it’s not set up quite the way I’d prefer, it’s directly on the beach and only three houses from the end of the row. And there’s an outdoor shower. And air conditioning.
I’ve had my Fuji cameras for over three years now and certain controls still confound me compared to Nikon and Canon. This article goes into how the highlight and shadow tone controls actually work—which is good for things like editing and correcting RAW files in-camera.
We are (slowly) reading our way through The Golden Compass and we’re all enjoying it. HBO is presenting a new film version of the books sometime this fall, and it looks very good:
We also have the earlier film adaptation to consider. I think I agree with the casting from 2007 more than this one (you can’t go wrong with Sam Elliott, ever) but apparently that version is a butchered mess dictated by a doomed studio. I’m intrigued to see how the new version is embraced by a longer serial format.
We’re scrambling to tie up loose ends and pack for the trip; with all of the curveballs we’ve been thrown this week it disrupted our plans to get ahead. The tree guys came back on Tuesday and hauled off the large logs they felled, which were sitting in the middle of the driveway. To do this they had to use the big grapple truck, and to get that in the driveway they had to prune one side of the tulip tree way back, so now it looks like someone with half a moustache. There’s a huge pile of chips where the tree once stood, and they ground out all of the roots that were surfaced in the middle of the driveway. When we get back from vacation and it cools off some I’ll have to figure out what we’re doing with that mess, and spend an afternoon spraying the east side of the house in one uniform shade of blue.
It’s also easier to see how shitty the garage looks now. The two sheets of plywood serving as doors have never looked good, so I have to think of some ideas for how to pretty them up. Now that the tree is gone I also want to dig a trench across the driveway to send runoff from the gutters into the neighbors’ yard and not directly into the front of the garage.
Jen texted me Wednesday, in the middle of the 100+ heatwave, to tell me the A/C in the CR-V had died. Given that we’re going to take it on vacation next week, we couldn’t defer this maintenance, but I knew it wasn’t going to be cheap to fix. Our local mechanic agreed to fit us in Thursday (god bless him) and looked it over first thing in the morning. The bill wasn’t cheap but it had to get done, so we pulled the trigger. We got it back last night and it is cool again, thank GOD.
Meanwhile the Scout is in Essex for what I’m assuming will be a substantial repair to the transmission while we’re on vacation. All of this happening at the same time sucks, but the fact that the average age of our vehicles is 20 years old means they’re going to need maintenance (this is somewhat tempered by the fact that we put a total of less than 10,000 miles on all three of them yearly.)
I set up the drip hose and timer in the greenhouse Wednesday night so that it runs for 15 minutes every morning at 6AM. We’ve got a bunch of nice tomatoes coming in (and we’ll have to pick a bunch and bring them to the beach) so I want to keep them alive until we get back. I did the same thing last year and it saved everything in there while I was stuck in the hospital, although it all grew out of control in our absence. I also collected one dead mouse from the traps I put out on Tuesday evening; someone was nibbling on two of our low-hanging fruit and I decided it was time to seek vengeance. Also, the tomatillo is gone, because Jen read up on them and found that there need to be two plants to cross-pollinate each other.
I could read articles about the space race in the 1960’s/1970’s for the rest of my life; almost everything about this part of America’s history represents the best of who we are and what we ascribe to. Ars Technica published a great article on the tremendous gamble the Apollo 8 mission was, in the shadow of the Apollo 1 fire and the gains the Soviet space program had been making to that point. Also see the Apollo 11 mission in real time.
News at 11: the President is a racist. Like it wasn’t already obvious. “Go back to where you came from” is the shit racist third-graders yell at other kids on the playground. What’s now painfully obvious is that our president should have to repeat the third grade.