palace of winds

I consult Yahoo! weather and it says, simply enough, 100. In an aside, Feels like: 108.

Somewhere in between there was my own temperature Thursday through Saturday, though it didn’t feel blistery and melty like this. For the most part it felt kind of shivery, actually, and I spent those days under a blanket on my couch.

Even though I definitely don’t ever get sick, I was definitely ever-so sick. Thursday morning I’d decided to go to the MinuteClinic even before the scary incident that involved lying on the spinning floor waiting to see if I’d be able to see again any time soon (I wasn’t; I made it to the kitchen through a sea of fuzzy white by touch and memory alone, where my fevered impulse toward water turned out to be the right thing). A shivering wait for the clinic to open at 7:30 and a rapid strep test later I was declared virused. I dragged my sorry, aching self to work and acted healthy and cheerful to meet a new client. The instant the door closed behind said client I begged to go home, and was sent off forthwith (well, after I ran payroll). I made it for a few hours on Friday too, but by noon sounded the retreat.

Other than my brief, brave stints at the office I alternately worked on becoming one with the couch, inspected the swollen back of my throat with a flashlight like an astronomer checking out a trainwreck on Mars, and tried to stop getting water up my nose while drinking. My parents (in two rounds, Thursday and Saturday) brought a mountain of food, many yellow flowers, a thermometer, ibuprofen, and two window fans. (They seemed much more concerned about the heat than I was, camped out there under my blanky.)

So that was my goodbye July.

I can’t believe I haven’t written since the eleventh. I intended to say so much more, about things like:

My San-Fran Trip

• And my deep and abiding love for Hobee’s. Especially the tea. Oh Hobee’s. Cruel California-only mistress.
• And Allison of astoundingness, she who is gorgeous and smart (would be scarily smart, very scarily, except she has managed to graduate from woah, SERiously? with all these life goals like wow and at some point you realize that you’re talking to someone who’s going to like publish things and rub elbows with presidents and generally be one of those people who don’t seem quite real, like they exist only on tv and in books, except she’s totally not one of those people, she’s all with the puns and laid back and fun and humble and *Allison* and she’s so great you almost have to hate her except somehow you don’t at all, it doesn’t even occur to you) and witty and looking in you pretty much have to want to be Allison.
• And the Time Police, with their chopsticks and flying take-out boxes and strainerhats and the keen watch they keep over the Future Resident Parking.
• And Yahoo! which I don’t even want to talk about because how can you not be madly jealous about the free drinks and fusball and the funky decor and the naming of the conference rooms and the suggestion boxes and bitty basketball hoops and humping dogs?
• And lying on the hammock, watching the stars and the flying motorbikes.
• And food, always more about food.

Katie’s Visit

• And Damien (who played something sort of ridiculous about illegitimate children that had me giggling and who played something sort of genius about a blower’s daughter that had me weeping) and Fiona (who was gloriously insane, who danced so unabashedly and so awkwardly, whose voice is a beautiful big low growling animal of a thing that finds the bone beneath your breast and rakes its fingers firmly up, who is Slow Like Honey in a crouched dim-lit darkly powerful way I don’t think I’ll ever forget).
• And A Scanner Darkly.
• And the tattoo, oh the tattoo!
• And the Scottish Festival, with its celebrity dogs and skittish sheep and the ultra-serious boy training for the haggis toss and the kilts and the naughty dice and the heat and water that tasted like sucking nickels but was oddly more refreshing for it and the happy little food stand whose kind owners had thought ahead of the vegetarians and the gingerbread and shortcake and the stick chuck and the bagpipes and particularly the green-stockinged clan and the dancers with their precise feet weaving a silent story about the restrictiveness of pants.
• And the finding of Hard Times, and how it felt to finally sit down in that dim diner with a tall glass of water like drinking new life.
• And Target, and that parrot.

Alex

• Walking. Walking now. Up on his little footsies all by himself and positively motoring around. Full-fledged.
• And turning one, amidst a shower of toys and balloons and cake, but NOT in the swimming pool, which he was having none of. But he didn’t like grass when he first sat in it either. Everything in time.

And, going with the above, the (near) completion of the secret project:

My dad and I built Alex a toychest. I kept forgetting to bring my camera over to my parents’ so there are very few in-progress pictures, but you can use your imagination. For a long time it looked like a heap of wood, and then suddenly it looked like a box, and the lid abruptly looked like a lid, and then we put them together and it looked like a chest. I spent most waking moments for a week or so finishing the painting of the front and side; my dad’s supposed to paint the remaining side, and I’m going to finish painting the lettering on the top. But you can get a pretty good idea from the pictures (er, which you can see more of by clicking on the one up there).

I feel really lucky to have done this project with my dad. We started way way back when — early this past spring — knowing a) it takes us forever to do anything, and b) we’d only be able to work on it one or two days a week. So I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays and some Sundays and the very occasional weeknight out at my parents’ house learning about measuring and cutting and assembling and finishing and all. A lot of our family activities involve all of us so it was a change to spend so much time hanging out with just my dad, and I’m very much aware that it’s time I’ll treasure forever.

I’m writing this in the lovely little coffee shop across the street from my apartment. I spent about two minutes in my 93F+ living room before deciding my evening was better spent in all this luxurious air conditioning, but they are beginning to wind down for the night, and my laptop battery with them, so that’s all for now.