Oh, my stars and garters!

Pouring rain; blazing sun

My lens is not wide enough, but in case you were wondering what's at the end of the rainbow, the answer is the UT tennis courts and the Brackenridge Hospital parking garage. Happy weekend!

This awful summer is really almost over, I swear. If it's not you can kick me in the shins. Except I won't care because I will be so sad that it is still this awful summer that I won't even notice.

The heat is going to break soon. The forecast says so, but I also feel it. There have been a few rainstorms in the evenings and it's been a few degrees cooler around sunset. The difference between 97 and 93 is pretty striking. Really, you can tell, and my Austin friends will back me up. We've all become heat connoisseurs this summer.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, this summer is dead to me. My social calendar is starting to pick up a bit and we're starting to make decisions on the Japan trip in October. It's both exciting and a little sad to take an entire country and narrow it down to a few neighborhoods. Whenever I'm planning a big trip I always worry that there's some other, better trip, the greatest, most amazing trip ever that we could be taking, if I were just smarter and more diligent with the research. But I think this will be a hard one to screw up.

The most exciting thing to me right now is that we've decided to splurge on a ryokan for a night. It's traditional Japanese lodging, and as I understand it, you check in, go soak in the hot spring baths for a while, and then put on a robe and slippers and wait until someone brings you an insane Japanese dinner. You gorge, then go out and wander around the grounds while someone clears out the dinner mess and lays out your straw mats and futon. Then you come back and pass out. I have stayed in some pretty decent hotels, but I think even the simplest ryokan is going to kick the living shit out of 600 thread count sheets and rosemary shampoo samples in the bathroom.

Sinus whinus

I caught a cold in Rochester, but I tried to ignore it because I was on vacation. I have been ignoring it ever since, going about my business as it ran its course and finally settled stubbornly in my left sinus cavity, where it has stayed for a week and a half. My eye twitches occasionally, I snorfle when I laugh, and I can smell little but my own nose in one nostril. I'm a prize, I am.

So I give up. I'm sick, ok? Sick! You win, cold; are you happy now?

Still, I don't want to go to the doctor because I can't fathom this lasting any longer than the inevitable course of antibiotics I'll get. But if it does and I'm still complaining, just sneak up behind me with a red-hot coat hanger end and shove it up my nose. Try not to take my screams personally. We will both know in our hearts you are doing it for my own good.

Amusement

After spending a day at Six Flags with friends, I have decided I am not too old for roller coasters, but I am definitely too old for amusement parks. I mean, duh, but I used to love going so much. Six Flags was a source of genuine pleasure and excitement as a kid, a place I could romp unsupervised as an adolescent, and something I could still enjoy wholeheartedly into my 20s so long as I relied heavily on irony and skin-deep sociological scrutiny as an excuse.

Now I just find the whole place kind of yucky. But goddamn, you tell me how else I'm supposed to be able to spend just $30 to get that great sensation that my stomach is still hovering about a foot above my head as we all plummet down the track and get caught by the brakes just in time, over and over. It's really fun to have that sensation every once in a while, cathartic even. I'm just not sure it's worth it to spend the day wandering amidst incoherent themes, sticky walkways, and puffy, hyperactive larval-stage humans to get it. 

Pace

Following politics is making me crazy, it's too hot to cook, the pools are scaling back hours already, I want to heave a brick through the TV, it's pointless to plant anything right now, beer has started to make me bloat, and the Internet is a boring, badly written suck that has robbed me of the concentration skills necessary to read printed materials. All that doesn't leave me much in the way of entertainment, but for some reason I'm in a pretty good mood lately, the occasional throwing of things notwithstanding.

Q: Why does a chicken coop only have two doors?

A: Because if it had four it would be a chicken sedan.

It's hot here and the mosquitoes are meaner.

Oh, gosh, I didn't intend for ol' rainbow crotch there to be front and center for over a week. Anyway, I'm home now after a bonus night in Rochester due to flight delays. More later when I've had more than two hours of sleep.

Shower power

My beautiful friends, I have made an important discovery today, and it is this:

Due to the placement of my bathroom window, when I take a shower in late morning while the sun is nearly overhead, rainbows appear to shoot out from between my legs.

Everyone should have the experience of a shower like that. I wonder if I could charge admission.

I will never stop being lazy and you can't make me.

I should be packing. Instead I drink beer. And do laundry; laundry is a virtuous, necessary thing, right? I like doing laundry because while it's going you can be doing anything else you want and you're still doing laundry. I mean, it's not my fault it takes an hour and I have to sit around on the internet drinking beer until it's dry.

Oh, shit, it just buzzed. Now I have to get up and do something. This is total bullshit. I want someone to petition Bill Clinton to negotiate my release from folding my freshly washed clothes. Where is he now, huh? What's he done for anyone lately?

Fly and fly

The immediate fun story is that Wednesday I'm going to Rochester to visit Vickie for a week. The last two times we visited were for each other's weddings, so we are way overdue for some laid-back hanging out. Plans so far include: talking, art projects, and maybe a day trip. And probably some more talking. I'll check in every once in a while just for kicks.

The longer-term fun story is that tonight we bought tickets to go to Japan in October. Holy shit! is what I keep having to say about that. Holy shit. Holy shit! We have been reading up on it, but it's becoming apparent that we are woefully unprepared already.

Actually, I don't know if we really can be prepared for that. Tokyo > Kyoto > Osaka > Okinawa is the loose plan for now. Eric has been to Tokyo once (albeit with this insanely seasoned traveler guy who took care of everything for them) and we're staying for a week with Eric's sister and her family on base in Okinawa (hi, Shannon!), but other than that, we're pretty much overwhelmed as far as what to do and how to do it.

Well, I'm pretty sure we'll find something to see there. We've been talking about this and saving and planning for a long time. It's weird and exhilarating to actually pick a flight and set the trip in motion. Holy shit!