Projectile Happenings

It's too hot for this. The heat coming off my laptop is making my wrists sweat. I can even feel a wave of it reaching my face every few seconds. All I really want to do is sleep but it is probably too hot for that too. Besides, every five to ten minutes there is a pop, a crack, a whistle, a boom or crackle as someone sets off a firework. Some of them are so loud they have to be illegal as Oregon has one of the stricter personal fireworks laws. We live in forest-fire territory tho the riskiest season for it hasn't arrived yet.

Last night the fireworks were going off constantly between nine and midnight. Hardly a single second of silence in all three hours. I was miserable then too, wanting only to sleep. It had been a long day with only a couple of hours of sleep before the company arrived. Just a family gathering here at the house. There had been talk of going to a park for a BBQ but the forecast was for triple digit heat and that didn't appeal to anyone. So we had cold salads--macaroni, potato, melon--chips and dip, deviled eggs, deli fried chicken. I made the deviled eggs.

I overate. Don't understand why I piled my plate with so much when I wasn't even hungry. Possibly I was trying to avoid another trip through the forest of feet and kelp-bed of elbows to come back through the house for seconds. My niece and I sat out in the back yard with Merlin on his leash and visited until her family left for home. More book and movie talk. She and I both get high on story.

After all the company left, Ed and I sat together in the back yard with Merlin. Then we moved to the front porch where we set up the laptop and he spent half an hour or so getting my TT post set up with the auto-link widget. Then he went to bed and I spent the next hour preparing my TT list. I was way too tired and hot to start surfing other TT. I just wanted to get posted and leave my comment on the hub. As soon as that was done, I headed inside. And regretted it immediately. The air in the room was sultry and heavy. But I craved sleep.

I had just started to doze when the fireworks started going off. After half an hour of rising anxiety as the air was saturated with blasts and the sulphurous smoke, I decided to try going back out to sit on the front porch where there just might be a small breeze to cool me off and leave a pocket or two of cleaner air. It was an ordeal walking out there. The sensation of having over eaten had gotten steadily worse over the six hours since the afternoon meal. Shortly after I got settled in a chair on the porch, sighing as a breeze hit my forehead, an extremely loud bang startled me into an upright position and suddenly I was providing my own contribution to the projectile happenings around me. The kind you get when you bounce a just-fed baby.

After a time, I was able to go inside and lay down on the couch in front of the fan. I actually dozed off and on as the fireworks outside wound down between eleven-thirty and midnight. Discomfort woke me about one and my stomach was saying, 'you aint seen nothin yet' and proceeded to prove it. When my private party with the bucket was over, I dozed fitfully on the couch until four and then moved back to the bedroom.

At ten, I heard my father-in-law outside my bedroom window with the weed-eater. I reached up and shut the window and went back to sleep. I slept until noon. When I came out to the kitchen to experiment with the idea of coffee (to ward off a headache) I found the dishes from yesterday in the sink. I had totally forgot about them. My mother-in-law was due home any moment. I hated for her to find them still to do. So I got started on them. We had used paper plates so it was mostly silverware and salad bowls and the morning coffee cups. I got them done before she came home.

Back in my room, I checked my email and considered visiting TT but the heat coming off the laptop made that less appealing than finishing the novel I started last Friday and which I had been able to read only in dribs and drabs since. It was Scott Westerfeld's The Specials, the third in his trilogy. They were another loan from my niece and a very thought provoking read. Before I had managed to stop dithering and decide, Ed popped open the door. Another short day for him. Knowing that he might be eager to get on the computer helped me decided. I broght the laptop to him on the porch. But before I settled in to read, I went after a cold shower. A trick I was reminded of by a scene in the second book of the series, The Pretties. Cooling down your circulation with a cold shower or dunk in a cold river, wakes up your brain.

I finished the book in less than an hour and then I looked around for a small sorting or organizing chore left over from the major reorganizing of our room this past weekend. I am trying to tackle at least one thing each day. The most annoying thing left over from the Saturday and Sunday shuffling of stuff and furniture is the two stacks of empty, nested cardboard boxes; every size from toothpick box to produce box. I've promised Ed that any box I have not found a use for by the time all the sorting and putting away is done will be fair game for stomping into the garbage can. But I had better make a good show of progress if I don't want to hear his growls.

(um, i have a thing about boxes. I've posted about it before. boxes aren't the only thing I have a thing for. Ed has a major beef with my various menageries of things. boxes aren't the only things I've promised to prune as the sorting proceeds. you can read more about this thing i have for things under the label, hoarding.)

Besides I am as annoyed as he is when they are in the way when we need something that is behind them or under them and more annoyed than he is by their ugliness. The look of them completely cramps the style we were going for. That is just the empty ones. There are also bunches of them stuffed willy-nilly with things just to get them out of the way for the major shifting of furniture Saturday and Sunday.

There are plenty of small sorting projects I could have chosen from that I could do sitting on the bed. But I chose instead to do one that entailed a lot of movement around the room and lifting of small to medium sized things. Not the funnest thing to be doing on a day the temps were aiming for the high nineties again. But when I was done, I was happier with the jerryrigged nightstand between the bed and new shelves on my side of the bed. The lamp and clock set steadier and the things I was used to having within reach while lying or sitting in bed had found new homes.

After I finished that task, I checked my email and visited Ed's TT. It was supposed to be the first of many TT visits but I took pity on Merlin and took him out to the back yard. Ed joined us there after the two of us had filled plates with left overs from yesterday. Well, my plate wasn't full this time. I put only melon chunks and two pieces of chicken on it. And then only because i wanted to share my chicken with Merlin. We also took a bag of chips out with us. We stayed out there until we lost the light to read by. As we were packing up to go in, the fireworks were starting up again and Merlin darted under the lawn chair and had to be drug out and carried in.

The room was nasty hot after getting used to the evening breeze. But I was more than ready to lay down. I was suddenly exhausted. I was getting settled when I remembered I had not posted today. I meant for this to be about two paragraphs of mostly whine about it being too hot to do it. Ha. I should know myself better than that by now.