After a short nap I’m semi-awake tonight, but on my way to curl up with the sandman in a bit.
Our cable TV is history. After my last bill I sucked it up and ordered a satellite alternative, chopping away about $75 a month from our expenses. The up-front kicker was painful but it won’t take long to more than make it up. We kept cable Internet. (What? You think I’m stupid?)
(Wait. Don’t answer that.)
Day back at work was body shock after entirely too little sleep. Older daughter’s boyfriend overhauled the wheels last night. When he showed me the parts it certainly explained the issues I’d experienced. It’s amazing the sucker drove at all. Needless to say, it’s doing substantially better today. Still no AC but no a lot more confidence in my ability to move from point A to point B, plus the bonus of substantially better gas mileage. Unfortunately I didn’t get home from the overhaul until midnight last night. so I literally got maybe 3 hours of sleep before the alarm went off. Blergh. Oh well, I did walk away from work today with a bit of booty I didn’t expect, a nice gift card from a contest I’d forgotten existed. A lot of disconnect, but that’s pretty typical for work, with any company, period.
I made some headway on the book rewrite. A lot of what remains from here is, if not precisely easy, at least more straightforward. If I keep telling myself that, maybe I’ll believe it.
We had an unexpected “visitor” for dinner. As we sat at the table, G noticed that just beyond the dining room doors (we have three sets of Arcadia glass doors in this apartment) a tiny hummingbird sat on the cement porch. He or she was alive and moving, but it obviously isn’t typical for a hummingbird to land on cement and make no attempt to take off – doubly so when he/she made no move to escape when G opened the door. We set out a tiny bowl of sugar water, hoping for the best. It managed to bathe in the water and probably drink some, too. I figured he or she wouldn’t survive the evening but G said wee birdie apparently managed to fly away. I hope it’s okay after all.
We don’t know if the creature was sick or overcome by the heat. This time of year is always overwhelmingly hot, on the order of 110ºF. There are always people and animals succumbing to the temperature spikes. The homeless are most suceptible, followed by the elderly and the poor who can’t afford escalating power bills required for cooling systems. Thank God at least I no longer have to drive to North Timbuktu to go to and from work. This kind of brutal weather is why I am willing to rise at such ungodly hours to drive in to work. I still have a kick-ass hot drive home in the afternoon but 1) it’s early afternoon and hence avoids the hottest part of the day and 2) no rush hour traffic which would mean even more time in a hot car.
Time for my rendezvous with the pillow!