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.)