I am sitting, barefoot, under a fan which is whipping cool air with the bay-and-beef draft from the beef stew simmering on the electric burner. Tonight I ate leftover stir fry, but tomorrow's lunch will be eaten with a spoon.

Usually September rolls in with humid, sticky afternoons and warm nights, but this year school started and the weather broke barely hours apart. I like it; I am about the only person at work who is rejoicing.

I am on the countdown to my fall class - intro to medical genetics - and to vacation! I am going to have so much fun in S. F.: less than three weeks to go.

Quick stew conclusions: om nom nom nom, but needs more salt. Writeup to follow.

Since Pandora took Muse and Bon Jovi and gave me Kevin Rudolf, it is my new best friend. For the five minute increments I'm at my work computer.

When I am organizing my days, I feel very relaxed, despite the extra cat- and plant-feeding I am doing. Then I remember that the last time I did this, I signed a lease, packed and moved in less than three weeks, while feeding the cats and without taking time off work. So perhaps it's not surprising I am so laid-back this time I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Or perhaps I'm filling it with other activities. Last weekend I had a double share of socializing Friday evening, gave blood Saturday morning, attended a Fever/Dream at Woolly Mammoth Saturday night with twistedchick, and had dinner Sunday with dad. That would also explain why I am curiously sleepless; also, I do badly with sleep when I'm not getting enough exercise. This leads to short-term attention memory deficit, why didn't I remember to load any music on my mp3 player, why am I wiped out at 4 PM, why I haven't the sense to stretch out and nap on the couch, today's movie double feature (The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home - stop looking at me like that, what did I just say about sleep deprivation?) and a curious inability to do anything constructive without external motivation.

Thanks to sgsguru's kind birthday gift, I am feeling the need to make an I Love the '70s (and '60's, and '80s, and country, and classical, and conscious hip-hop, and - okay, I just like music) mp3 mix, but I think I've finally been up long enough to fall over and sleep.

"Reunion Hill" is and isn't summer music; this is one of the cooler summers I remember, which is okay by me, but breaking out the DMB classics like "Ants Marching" when it's less than 80 F seems just wrong, however long the days may be. I'm sure August will fix this to and beyond my satisfaction, but for the moment the weather is keeping my attention.

Another reason my eye is on the weather is Friday's company picnic. If it rains this year, that will make three picnics in a row that have been rained out, and the forecast is calling for thundershowers.

Dear summer: thank you for giving me peaches and fresh corn. Also, thank you for going away. Sincerely, the loyal opposition.

Tonight's cooking experiment: baked pork chops with crushed garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. 350 F, 15 minutes, flipped at 10 minutes. I used a regrettably heavy hand with the spices, so it may be salvage-or-toss time. K. recommended making pork chops into pork-pasta salad, which might actually work. The side dishes - couscous and tomato-ish salad - came out nicely. The couscous just got olive oil and basil. The salad was one cucumber, seeds removed; a green pepper, a red pepper, half a vidalia onion, and several heirloom tomatoes, with a little olive oil and basil and a lemon squeezed over everything. I think I will have a light lunch tomorrow (couscous and salad), or maybe I will declare Culinary Oops Day and see who I can sweet-talk into a sushi run.

September is apparently my month for good intentions. I'm trying to cook, I'm trying to exercise (not 90 degrees every day! I can bike more than five minutes without dying! Awesome!) and I'm trying be mindful of that whole lactose intolerance thing*. Fortunately, Nabisco has removed every remnant of unprocessed ingredients from Oreos, so now they're milk free, hah! That's one junk food snack back on the list.

*Lactase: there are limits, and I still get dehydrated even when the pills are in the right bag and I remember to look for them. Finally, they're kind of expensive on the per diem.

I finally ate my pork chop of dubious character while listening to C-SPAN radio (what's the difference between NPR and C-SPAN? Not that much, when the boombox is on top of the fridge), and decided it's a good day to be me: not in a hurricane recovery zone, secure job, income exceeding expenditures. Health care! If the banks don't collapse under me and my fellow Americans, because some of my fellow Americans are thoughtless people who vote sub-par hooting primates underqualified individuals into national office, I'm going to hang on until the upturn. There's a lot of people who don't have that confidence right now. I was going somewhere with that, but it's, um, really late, so I'll just plug the Red Cross and your local food bank and remind people that when you vote for out of touch and underqualified people, you're voting for recessions.

Yeah, no rage there. Cough.

I'm watching the Republican National Convention with winamp on. Accidental Giuliani/Jewel mashup for the win., but if Palin's not talking by 10:30, I'm throwing in the towel and catching the recaps in the morning.

One of my roommates is moving out this month, so it's roomie-shopping time. Landlord posted the ad yesterday, and two guys came over today to check it out. One I really liked, but didn't make an offer; one I was 90% cool with, and did make an offer. I hate change, and I hate trying to evaluate people based on a brief interview I didn't really prep for. What magic question is going to make me comfortable with a possible roommate?

How many times can Giuliani say "terrorists" in five minutes? Seriously, can someone do a wordcount on this speech?

The significant local news is TS Hannah's possible near-miss this weekend. I'm personally betting on winds and some downed power lines, but nothing more devastating than that May thunderstorm.

Oh, hi, Palin! Now, less with the screaming and clapping and more with the platform, please. It's like those horrible mandatory high school pep rallies, only I'm not even getting out of class.

Dear internet,

1.) Obama mania. "God bless you. And God bless America." To a packed stadium. Seriously, this is awesome political theater.

Meanwhile, the DNC is having New Orleans-related freakouts. Can't we just swear Obama in tomorrow, please?

2.) One of my roommates is about a month from losing his student visa, and in the meantime is using the kitchen table as a staging ground for his electronic nerve center. I am trying to find a polite way to indicate I'm about three seconds from shoving his desktop out the nearest window and sending his laptop after it, because it's on the kitchen table, and there are two other people who use that space. This week's theme is people stepping on my toes, and it's getting old.

3.) Speaking of crazy, what does metro do on a holiday weekend? Massive track maintenance impacting National! I will be running the heck away from the blue and yellow lines.

This week's been surprisingly uneventful, with fantastically cool weather; today I woke up to morning rain for the first time since I moved. It'd be nice if it stayed this cool for a whole, but the weekend's supposed to be warm and rainy, and then warm and sunny, so no joy.

Victory! The last pieces of my book case finally resurfaced in my over-the-shoulder bag. I'm down to two boxes (and kitchen stuff) I actually plan to unpack, and four (or five) of old class notes that are make dandy furniture.

Every time I put together weather forecasts (awful), sunrise data (too early), and household schedules (head-on shower/shave/toothbrushing collisions, every morning), I start seriously thinking that getting up at 5:30 might not be an intrinsic affront against my fundamental nature. This is what happens when I don't have a two hour (one way) commute: I think getting up earlier is a good idea. I very much doubt this idea will survive the daylight to standard time conversion.

Today's early wakeup was muffed by last night's adventures in music mix construction. (You thought I was going to say "music mix making". Ha ha.) After much consideration, I am absolutely convinced that Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" ("just to try it / I hope my boyfriend don't mind it") needs to be stuck in a mix with Fall Out Boy's "Thnks Fr th Mmrs" ("he tastes like you but sweeter"). Possibly in the same mix as "Gotta Get Over Greta" and "I Spent My Last $10.00 (On Birth Control and Beer)" just to make a point. It turns out that exhibitionary lesbianism annoys me about as much as any other blatant appeal to the male 15 to 45 demographic. Also in the mix: the Killers' "Somebody Told Me" (more exhibitionism); Blur, "Girls & Boys" (exhibitionism '90s grunge rock style).

I have music spread over three hard drives, and two of these are supposed to be mirror copies. Is there an easy synch/backup program that can handle cross-talk among a 60, 80, and 320 gig hard drives? Oh, the largest is an external, and the medium has been partitioned for an XP/linux dual-boot with minimal NTFS space and no FAT32.

Tonight I had S. from college over for dinner. "It's too hot to cook," I said, "so let's just plan to get a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store." When we got to my place, chicken in hand, a classic summer cloudburst had popped the temperature bubble. The irony was a pleasant flavor with the couscous (just add carmelized onions, basil and lemon), chicken and corn on the cob. Dessert was Hagen-Dazs mango sorbet, which is essentially frozen syrup. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of choice, but I thought it was too sweet.

And oh, here comes the sugar crash. Good night, all, and to all a good night.

My to-do list hasn't been stalled by any reluctance to put on real clothes. It has been stalled by 92 degrees of misery with 54% humidity. (In case you missed it, I loathe and abhor any temperature above 80 F when the humidity is above, oh, 20%. Who spent a few formative years in a desert? Hi!) Today may be a good day to learn what bribes my roommates will accept for taxi services.

In the meantime, May reading:

Babel-17 (Samuel Delany): The beautiful poet and genius linguist Rydra Wong is recruited to unravel the other side's code in an interstellar war. ( Spoilers! )

Someone lent me two graphic novels, The Tale of One Bad Rat and Fun Home. I tried and failed to read both. Rat nearly got hurled against a wall by spinal reflex for being unexpected Child Abuse Is Bad fiction; I got as far as the back cover copy for Fun Home and nixed it for proximity to Rat, as well as general indifference, before I ever cracked it open. Neither were the fantasy or SF tropes I was expecting.

If I finished anything else, it's been lost in the shuffle. May was nuts and fruitcake and a very short attention span.

List of things I do not understand:

1.) Alignment software
2.) Phylogenetics software
3.) State songs

Virginia's "emeritus state song" is "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia" (sometimes spelled "Virginny") which completely fails any PC tests. The move to replace the state song has been on since 1999; the interim state song is "Shenandoah".

"Maryland, My Maryland". You have to wonder about any song that proclaims "Avenge the patriotic gore/That flecked the streets of Baltimore" in the first stanza; it took even Francis Scott Key a little longer than that to fall from metaphor to invoking actual blood.

The District of Columbia doesn't seem to have any sort of official song. Too bad; it might be as charming as the DC license plate.

Chiming in on local gossip: got damp biking to work last Thursday, and got a more thorough soaking today. I cannot predict cloudbursts to save my life - or at least my jeans. I'm watching the weather with a mix of childish glee and horror. On the one hand, water! Lots of water! Flooding the metro, when was the last time that happened? And ohhh, lightning. On the other hand, chaos, turmoil, and property damage are not cool. At least no one's died yet, though that could change; predictions seem to call for even more rain tonight.

Judging by the deafening number of comments I've gotten lately, I'm apparently even less amusing than usual, so let's make this an interactive post. Reply to this with a topic you'd like me to pontificate on. I'll give you a paragraph, unless it warrants a post.

Two days into true summer temps - lower 80's/upper 90's, 50% humidity and rising, shirt sticking to your back in five minutes or less of life al fresco - the AC at home has kicked the bucket. The AC repair people suggest they'll be able to come out in a week.

Also? Thunderstorms.

Never have I had such a great excuse to hide in a glorious, windowless, air-conditioned office (shared with two other people) and compose long livejournal entries.

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I do not have SAD. I am not ADD, ADHD, hypoglycemic, manic-depressive, or anything else I've thought I might be, except maybe a touch hypochondriac. That said, I definitely loosen up and start experimenting with food when it gets warmer. Recent exploits include the Spanish rice mess, banana bread muffins, and peanut butter cookies.

( Nothing is more boring than other people's cooking notes. )

Tangentially, fresh herbs blow dried out of the water. Thank you, dad, for the home-grown oregano. You have spoiled me for life.

Temp: 98 degrees.
Heat index: 106 degrees.
Humidity: 42%

These are the days when I take the college bus down the hill, to stay out of the humidity for an extra 30 seconds. Fortunately, a cold front should come through tonight and cool things off. We hope.

Strangely, reading The Maltese Falcon is great prep for The Dispossessed. At least, tD was more engaging than irritating. (I'm skimming coffeeandink's journal for Le Guin comments; she notes that Le Guin is a didactic writer. And that explains so many quibbles I have with her novels.) I've never read anything of Le Guin's that I've enjoyed as much as the original Earthsea trilogy, and I keep coming back looking for that spark.

Or maybe the heat's fried my brain into seeing stuff that's not there. Ah, summer.