The heat (and, yeah, the humidity.)
Wednesday, May 21st, 1997
Hello from Atlanta on a blissfully cool night, after about a week and a half of the heat and humidity that just slams in here in late spring and doesn’t let up until well after August. Well, maybe I exaggerate…a little.
We live in a house built soundly enough that it does hold in the cool air for a couple of days into this assault on our comfort, making it a pleasure to come in out of the muck. But then there’s always a day–this year, it was earlier this week–where these four walls give up and it becomes as hot or hotter inside–especially upstairs–as it is outside. Ceiling fans, a fixture of every southern home, snap on, and we fight the warmth off for a while, until it becomes time to crank up the a/c, as much for the survival of the computers (hey, this is valuable data!) as it is for ourselves.
It’s funny to sit here and realize I’ve lived in Atlanta long enough–I’ve lived here, in this house long enough–to have an overwhelming sense of these rhythms.
Sammy and I have been hitting the keyboard, mouse, and bitpad heavily the past few days (I can tell because the grass outside is reaching savanna proportions); most of what she’s been doing is, simply, diving into radiocarbon dating, its usefulness, its deficiencies, what has been done in her study area in Mexico, how much of it she can trust, and so on. Way too complicated for a television graphics guy.
As for me, I’ve been spending big gobs of time designing one logo–one logo!–for a cable news operation that’s starting up this fall. It’s hard to get it just right, and I’m putting a bunch of sweat into it. (I’m not sure perspiration helps the equation, but it’s there in much of what I do.)
So we work, and I find myself neglecting this space and, well, it’s like tonight: I have a choice of staying up half the night tweaking these web pages, or spending the night snoozing with my wife.
So, goodnight! (And next time maybe I’ll have a moment to talk about some new sites, like those of ABC News, The Green Hornet (!?), or my old pal, the atomic clock.)
One hail of a week.
Saturday, May 3rd, 1997
Well, this past seven days flew by, and I find myself looking at a soggy backyard again, just like last Saturday. This is indeed springtime in Atlanta. But there have been a few twists. Take Monday, when we had a front come through with enough force to produce the archetypal Golf-Ball-Size-Hail–and one heck of a lot of it, enough to leave a tattoo of small depressions on our truck and enough to make big chunks of newly-minted leaves come crashing out of the trees that surround the house. I heard somewhere (so it must be true) that it was the worst hailstorm to hit our fair city.
It was annoying at the very least. And I had no sooner raked (yes, raked) the lawn of most (okay, well, some) of the leaves from that storm when another one comes through this morning, with no hail but plenty of wind, so, well, you know (or can suspect) the rest.
And it’s been a fast-paced few days, starting with the rainout of our camping trip. Our guests were nice enough to sit and watch endless hours of slides and video of Mexico. (As we watched, we ate all the 387 kinds of bean dip Sammy made for the trip.)
Then later in the week we picked up Art Murphy and stashed him in our guest room for a few days. This was only fair, of course, because he and Martha made us feel quite comfortable in Oaxaca.
And then, at the end of the week, Sammy took off for Augusta and the meetings of the Society for Georgia Archaeology. Happy Archaeology Week in Georgia, by the way!
Somewhere in between all of that, I experimented with beta versions of all kinds of cool mac technologies (shh, they’re all confidential), rendered some nice-looking animation with Electric Image, and oh yeah, watched the puppy episode of Ellen.
And you wonder why my life is so complicated?
