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July 25, 1999 |
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humidity |
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July 25, 1999 Today's Starting Pitcher: Brian Rose Today's Reading: none
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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It's so humid out that I feel like I'm getting mildewed. I worked up a sweat just eating breakfast at Andrea's on Thayer Street and browsing at the Brown Bookstore with Nancy this morning. The Brown Bookstore is undergoing renovations - they're calling it a metamorphosis, which prompted us to imagine the store waking up one morning to discover it has become a cockroach. We couldn't find the poetry section. The bird books and natural history books are on a shelf labeled "antiques and collectibles". I bought nothing for myself, but bought all three of the Julie of the Wolves series for Lizzy to atone for being in Hungary on her birthday next Sunday. Since Nancy's apartment isn't air conditioned, we decided to drive around enjoying the air conditioning in my car. The ac in my car is not that effective, but it was quite comfortable compared to sweltering indoors. We looked for monk parakeets in East Providence and found two out of the dozens that live there. We sat by the bay at Colt State Park and listened to the Red Sox lose on the radio. We decided it wasn't entirely Brian Rose's fault and hoped the pitching coach would sentence him to extra fielding practice again. The heat and humidity is really getting to me. When I got home, I had a phone message from La Madre wanting to know how well I'd survived the storm and was my power back on 'cause hers was out. My power was on, and in fact hadn't been off during the weekend. I called her and found out her power had been out since mid afternoon and was just coming back on, trees were down, branches down, etc. There was nothing like that here. She said they'd had a bad thunderstorm last night too. From the pattern of power outages she described (Newton, Wayland, Sudbury) I guessed that the storm had been well to the west of my house. Thunderstorms are such local phenomena that terrifying destruction can be happening one place and nothing at all at another. When I went to Circuit City on Friday to buy a new modem to replace the one that got toasted in Thursday night's violent thunderstorm here, the clerk was surprised I'd had any damage in North Andover when nothing had happened in Peabody. North Andover is a lot closer to Peabody than to Newton. I didn't mention Thursday's storm or my toasted modem to La Madre. I'm amazed nothing else in my house except the phone, was damaged. The thunderclaps and lightning were simultaneous and sounded like bombs were being dropped on my condo complex. The sound woke me out of a sound sleep and scared Wilbur into cowering downstairs under the couch. The power flickered several times and finally went off and stayed off for about three hours. My clock radio doesn't have battery backup (hmm, the old one did) so the alarm time reset itself when the power came back on. Sometime in the wee hours, the radio came on and I awoke to the BBC announcers' strange pronunciation of Martha's Vineyard. I shut the radio off but forgot to reset the alarm, so it didn't go off to wake me up at 8:00 so I'd be awake when the pet sitter came. It wasn't until the pet sitter called to tell me what time she was coming that I realized the phone and the modem didn't work. None of this made it into Friday's entry, because I try to restrict the plover warden entries to my plover warden experiences as I get a lot of readers who are only interested in those entries and don't want to know about the rest of my highly amusing life. Then this business about my mother worrying about me during thunderstorms at her house that didn't come near mine came up ... Anyway, I ended up with a good excuse to throw away my 28k modem and get a 56k one. |
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