You know, after Wednesday I thought I'd never be cool again.

I usually telework on Wednesday, but we had an all-hands meeting in the afternoon and I already had a bunch of orders ready to go out. It was sweltering in the building; if it was 80°F in my cubicle, it must have been 90 in the bathroom. When we got into the Chamblee building for the meeting, the hallway was blessedly cool, but the meeting room itself was suffering from too many 98.6s. It was so warm and stuffy I had to keep myself from fleeing in a claustrophobic sweat. I headed home to finish up for the afternoon and was never so glad to get changed in my life; everything was sticking to me. Yuck.

Yesterday I ended up juggling several problems, least of which was the internet connection. Wednesday night we had a thunderstorm, a big, screaming affair which made the lights blink twice and at one point sounded like a cannon going off over the house. Despite three UPS units, one on each computer and one on the router and modem, James' network card blew out and we're pretty sure the router as well (since we didn't reload it, we don't know for certain). The modem did come back up, so we had to take turns swapping out network cords to use computers. Thursday night James brought home a new router, which stymied him for about a half hour. The instructions were pretty bad, and the router itself automatically tried to set you up for a PPPoE connection. It appeared, the way the instructions worked, that the only way you could set up a DCHP connection (what we have) was to put in DNS numbers. But Earthlink's never given us DNS numbers. James was fit to be tied and sat down to think. I sat down to look at the silly thing and wondered, "What happens if you click the button without putting any numbers in?"

It connects, of course. Thanks, guys. You could have said that.

After that, everything was easy. Except for the laptop, which does not play well with others. I've pretty much decided I need to strip any files I want kept, like my chat files, off the thing and restore it to factory settings.

Which brings us to today. Revised an advertisement, wrote another one, worked on an order, let an end user know why I needed certain information, asked a vendor for confirmation on stock and delivery—another words, the usual stuff. Listened to various things off BBC4X: another part of Unnatural Death, Who and Me by Barry Letts (former producer of Doctor Who), and more Sherlock Holmes. These latter episodes are part of a multi-year project in which the BBC did radio adaptations of every single Holmes story in the canon as well as...I think I remember them saying all the books, but at least Hound of the Baskervilles. Clive Merrison is Holmes and Michael Williams is Watson.

Since we ended up not having supper last night, I cooked the chicken thighs tonight, baked, with mint and a bit of kosher salt, with fresh Yukon Golds from the Farmer's Market on the side. Most of one of my thighs went for a sandwich for Monday. Mmm. Chicken sandwich.

Later we drove to the Barnes & Noble at Akers Mill to have dessert and read on our Nooks. You can read any e-book free for an hour at B&N, so I am working on Billy Boyle, a mystery story about an Irish Boston cop assigned to England during World War II. He's related to Mamie Doud Eisenhower on his mother's side of the family, so he ends up doing what might be seen as a cushy job with "Uncle Ike." Instead, Eisenhower plans to use him to investigate situations which he wants kept under wraps: in this book, a spy within the Norwegian refugees who accompanied King Haakon to England. Billy is rather full of himself, which doesn't sit well with his English hosts at first.

We split a chocolate cupcake and something called a "double chocolate chip," a "creme" drink at the Starbucks. The latter was like the "iced hot chocolate" at Dunkin Donuts, only much better tasting.

When we emerged from the store there was an absolutely fabulous sunset spread out before us: there were just enough clouds left from the late afternoon rain we had to make a magnificent palette for the setting sun: yellows, oranges, dark greys shading to purple, a few red edges, a pink glow on the higher clouds...lovely. Sunset always reminds me of my dad. He'd be sitting in the living room watching the news while Mom washed the dishes, and the picture window and front door faced northwest. If he saw a beautiful sunset, he'd tell my mom to drop what she was doing, and they would watch the sunset together.

So we drove home through the purply-grey dusk edged in scarlet, the "purple dusk of twilight time" that my car is named after, with the windows down as the air was still cool from the rain shower we'd had around suppertime. (I went out to fill the bird feeders just before it started. The temperature dropped ten degrees in the five minutes I was outside doing the refilling.) As we passed by tree-draped home lots and backyards, fireflies winked among the long grasses, and I basked lovingly in the cool air.

Sometimes summer evenings can be pleasant after all.

Labels: books, weather, work

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