Temperature's Risin'

.... Well, not now it's not. It's late and there is a front blowing in, so the wind is cooling things a bit. It was a hot one today. Depending on your sources it was about 99-100F. The humidity is at 8%, so it is a dry heat dammit!

I'm having one of those lovely chocolate truffles from Joseph Schmidt's in San Francico. Yum.

I worked out yesterday and today. The usual routine, but adding more time + distance on the treadmill. Today was screwy. About 4 laps into my routine where I'd set my time for 35 minutes and while talking to someone on the other treadmill, I managed to pop the safety key gesturing somehow which brought me to a fast stop. Lost the settings. I didn't start the same routine then, so I chose the weight loss routine instead and started over. And I finished too... even though the last 10 minutes were a bitch and I had to do a little mental prodding to keep going. Worked up a darn good sweat.

After my stroll did a few light reps weights and a quick cool down. While doing my hamster routine on the treadmill, I managed to get a few pages into my new John Scalzi paperback, The Ghost Brigades, and got a pretty damn good chuckle at his homage to past and current sci-fi writers. Definitely a kind of inside joke even though we should never assume that's what he actually believes about them. The book is fiction, y'know. :::nodding:::

That fire at Tahoe flared up again after it was almost under control. The latest report I read was that over 300 structures have burned. I feel badly for those who were burned out of their homes. Sometimes when I think about wanting to live up in the mountains -- which is truly a beautiful way to live -- I imagine living in a semi-underground earth works & concrete Soleri style fortress that includes space an open solarium or court yard for gardening and space for the family car(s) too. Ok, I like the notion of good fireproofing. It's just one of those practical things.

It took me half an hour to finish my one truffle. It was very nice... flavored with Bailey's with a hard, dark chocolate shell around the ganache.

There are too many stories in the news about people wiping out their whole families. There's been a whole spate of them the last few weeks. On the one hand part of me wants to smack the perps down hard. Let justice's sword cut them out from the body of humanity & isolate them. I recognize that a small number of these killings will prove out to be rock-bottom acts of desparation & pain that we onlookers will rue that it ever got that far. But it seems like most of these kinds of family murders lately have been about control, the desire to have power over someone, and always getting their way no matter what. I want to ask them, "How dare you think that self-serving crap?" "Where do you get off believing you're entitled to continue hurting someone you hurt into leaving you?" "Who gave you the right??" Gods forbid that any of them are just evil to the bone. Truth is while I may have something resembling a clue given humanity's past & ancient histories, but I still don't know how we got to these kinds of situations in the first place. When did we stop living civilly anyway??

Yeah, it's hot. I know.