Slept until 11. Didn't do anything all day. Smoke from NC outside until some time in the afternoon. They say it's brush fire... well, those brushes were made of cheap plastic. I can recognize the stink of burning garbage, at home we had at least one day with the wrong wind almost every summer.
When I wanted to go for my bike ride (I've introduced this as my regular workout starting this week, as a pleasant way to lose weight), Lena decided to join me. Took a few minutes to prepare the other bike ("one drop of šivanol" ((c) Carp), pump the tires) and off we went... until about the end of our street, when it sort of started raining. We drove back.
Half an hour later, it seemed like it didn't really start raining... the pavement was dry. So we took off again, and got one parking closer than the last time when a real outpour began.
Now if we would: water the plants, wash the car and go for a ride, we could start charging for rainmaking (or be paid not to do it, just like Adams's rain god).
Evening, watched "Constant gardener" again, first hour only, then Go called. Later, Nina and Ender came and we had a bit of a larger chat all together.
Bought two books for Lena on Amazon, "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer and "Cracking the AP Physics B Exam, 2008 Edition (College Test Prep)". She's taking her school seriously.
And she's attending yet another school. Yesterday she was learning to knit. Today she started for real.
On seventh there was yet another party, at some guy Paige (or a girl?), and I'm driving Lena there, then later when she calls to say it's over, driving her back. While it's still in some area for viewers with cheaper tickets* (there'll be other parties later, north of the highway, where they didn't raze the forest before building), so it's not as posh, but is still somehow more lickety split than our end, less garbage strewn around. Not that there's much of it here, it's just even less there.
Of course, driving around and doing nothing, I shoot as much as I can, including on the road. For this one I had to check now, whether the word really exists, or simply some deaf scribe on Ellis island wrote it down the way he heard it, or the new illiteracy made its way into street naming. And behold, it's not a Holliday with a typo, there are two Holladays, one in Utah and one in Tennessee, and there were two prominent characters with the surname, one was making whiskey and the other held postal carriages (or was it those public speaker trainers... stage coaches, both). Though, it's also possible that all of them originated as Hollidays, then got written down like this, and once written down it's hard to change back.
This one I shot waiting at a light, they dug something for the cables, the cranes are, I guess, to post the poles. This shot later ended in the series „Americah the gray“, because, apart from these orange signs and a few beams, there's nothing else in color on it.
Dad's apricots bore well, despite the blossoming having ended uglily. Says it's whole bundles of fruits, Mikica should come take shots with his cell phone to send us. Well I guess it looks just as it did three years ago.
Firriver is in Barcelona on Eshre, and those Russians will be there too, so David said to dust off that cyrillic version, to brag with.
Finally replaced the headlights. The plastic on the old ones went blurry and yellowed. Last year they failed it on the inspection, so Nina and Ender brought me some paste so we polished them, and then they passed one and I paid 40$ to have the other polished again (though I didn't notice it getting any better). Now I found on the net a brand new pair for 50$, complete with bulbs (bulbs alone are at least 4$), and replaced them. Less than half an hour of work, but at +30 I was all water by the end of it, fresh breeze didn't help much.
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* Alan Ford, of course
6-VII-2008 - 9-X-2026