Yesterday was my first Fourth of July as a dual citizen. I got to celebrate both my countries’ birthdays in one week. We didn’t go out to see the fireworks, but we could hear them from the living room. If they were going to be as exciting as the ones in San Diego, I might have considered going out. Apparently something went wrong in San Diego and they all went off at once. Fifteen minutes’ worth in fifteen seconds. The video is quite impressive. The still looks like the backdrop from a Pink Floyd concert.
I spent most of the day yesterday configuring my new PC. Just as Windows 8 is about to launch, I’m finally joining the Windows 7 community. My old computer was getting sluggish and loud, and the USB ports were acting wonky, so I figured it was time to upgrade. Getting all the files transferred, and the emails and the music, as well as reinstalling all the software is busy work, but it has to be done so I bit the bullet and did as much of it as I could manage during the daytime. I still have a couple of things left to do (rebuilding my iTunes library, for one), but I’m mostly there.
We watched The Descendants last night. It stars George Clooney as the trustee of a 25,000 acre parcel of land on Kauai, passed down for generations, which now the clan of cousins wants to sell for development. That’s only the B story, though. The main story is about his wife, who is in a coma after hitting her head in a boating accident. He learns something shocking about her and has to figure out what to do about it while simultaneously switching from being the backup parent to the primary custodian of his 10-year-old and 17-year-old daughters, the latter of whom was a handful even before her mother’s accident. It’s an excellent character study, full of little moments. Clooney is terrific, as is the actress who plays his older daughter, who rallies behind him once he decides to go on a mission. Clooney’s father-in-law is a hardass who blames Clooney for his daughter’s accident (though he has to make a few logical leaps to get there). He has a funny scene with the elder daughter’s friend, a seemingly stupid surfer dude who says something terribly inappropriate and ends up with a knuckle sandwich. Judy Greer has some strong and surprising moments, too. An all-round fine movie.
I finished off Murder in Four Parts by Bill Crider (a fun crime novel with a sardonic protagonist not unlike Bill himself) and we went through the two disks of The Sopranos extra features, so now it’s time to move on to something else. Not sure what I’m going to read next. I’m leaning toward The Wire as the next TV program. I watched the latest Rizzoli and Isles this morning while on the elliptical trainer. I guess Sharon Lawrence is almost old enough to play Maura’s mother—in real life there’s a 12 year age difference and on the show it’s supposed to be 17 or 18 years.
We had a rainy weekend. I barely managed to get the lawn mowed on Saturday morning before it started. Then we had another good soaking yesterday. At the midpoint of the year, we’ve received about 27″ of rain, which is just a touch over average. We only got 8″ in all of 2011.
After my overexposure to sun last week while riding around in northern California with the top down on our rental convertible, I’ve gone through three distinct stages of peeling. (Too much information? I find it fascinating!).
It was 100° the day we arrived in San Francisco, the tail end of a heat wave, but it moderated quickly after that. Most days the temperature was in the seventies and it was in the forties at night, which was especially brisk the two nights we stayed in the cabin. It’s hard to be back in the hundreds again after a week of such a nice climate. It was 105° yesterday. iPhone users were reporting 108° but apparently that’s an anomaly caused by the location of the temperature sensor at the Medical Center.
I’ve been away on vacation for the past week. Got back home around midnight last night after a week in northern California. Even though I took my iPad and had WiFi, it’s taking me a while to get caught up.
We got smacked by a storm that snuck up on us yesterday afternoon. Nobody seriously expected we’d get any rain yesterday. They posted a 20% chance, but that was just them being optimistic. But then around 3:30 or 4:00 the sky suddenly went pitch black, the wind picked up, thunder and lightning started. I received a call from the EMS warning of potential hail and damaging winds.
Spent much of the weekend reading over the manuscript for my next book before it goes off to the copy editor. I found a bunch of typos and slip-ups. Not a ton, but enough. I still have a fair amount of the book to go through, but I will be finished with this step by Friday at the latest.
We had a good soaking rain overnight. We need it. However, the dog next door didn’t seem pleased to be outside during the heavy rain, thunder and lightning, which meant we didn’t get a great night’s sleep.
Whenever people ask me who has influenced my writing, they’re generally surprised by my response. After waffling on about how everyone I ever read has contributed to my style and approach, I generally cite one author as the greatest influence, and it’s not who you’d probably guess. It’s Ray Bradbury, who died last night.
I solved another problem with my message board that means I won’t be so hasty to migrate to new software, which takes a load of work off my plate. The main problem with the YaBB board (other than its habit of ceasing to work every couple of years) is that it is a magnet for spammers who come by, register and then post a bunch of linky messages that I have to tidy up.