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jimsjournal

Melting -- 07/22/11




I am melting...

That heat wave that broiled the middle of the country reached the Atlantic coast and I am slowly melting, along with the rest of Rhode Island.

I've always been one to enjoy warm weather but it is not only hot, it very humid. How humid? Well, if it were much more humid we could just float up and swim through the air. (Actually, that sounds like fun... and today's weather is not fun.)

I shut down one of the computers here because I thought it was over heating -- it was certainly acting up and it felt very hot on the side away from my fan.

I've got a big fan sitting on a chair in the entrance to my office. The fan is pointed right at me from about five or six feet away, set on medium (not high because that would blow everything off my desk, medium only blew a few things off).

Nancy had Jeremy install one of our window A/C units in our room a week or two ago. At night a window fan usually seemed to do a good enough job for me (well, except for maybe two or three nights each summer) but Nancy has been studying up there for a course she is taking and it was getting to be too hot to study. Tiger appreciates having a cool room. Most days he has been spending about half of his time down here in my office and half upstairs in our room. Today he spent about an hour down here and by eight a.m. he wanted to go back upstairs. So he has spent the day in air-conditioned comfort. (Yes, I am running an A/C unit for a cat -- he's 18 years old, which puts him in senior citizen status for a cat and seniors are supposed to need special care in heatwaves, right?)

I've not posted because I have just been too busy for the past week. A week ago yesterday we took a sunset lighthouse cruise on Narragansett Bay with Nancy's sister Janet and Janet's husband Tom. There are hour and a half long cruises on some afternoons (on the Millenium, which also serves as the high speed ferry from Quonset to Martha's Vineyard)... and on Thursday evenings they do a two hour long sunset lighthouse cruise. It starts at Quonset, goes under the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge to Conanicut Island (Jamestown) and out to the entrance to the bay, then loops back past Beavertail Light and then in along Aquidneck Island, running up the coast from Fort Adams State Park and into Newport Harbor, then out of the harbor and across the northern tip of Conanicut, and back to Quanset, passing ten lighthouses along the way.

And then this past weekend was the 2011 Providence edition of the 48 Hour Film Project. Yes, another year has rolled around. I had to stop in Wawick on my way to our Friday night kick-off session because I needed to get my windshield replaced -- I had one of those fine-line cracks (who knows, a piece of gravel thrown up by another vehicle?) that was beginning to spread noticeably.

We drew Silent Movie for our genre (well, actually, we drew Romance and it had been decided in advance that if that came up we would ask to draw from the second choice bowl). So we made a strange little movie about some strange blue eggs that sparkled.

Anyway, that pretty much too care of my weekend and any left-over energy on Sunday went to things like groceries and yardwork and getting ready for our Monday night novelist bootcamp workshop. (I guess I've not mentioned it here, but Nancy and I are both working on writing novels.)

Wednesday night Jill and Nancy headed off for Canada. I think Nancy drove over to New York State and then Jill took over and drove up the Northway to Canada, turn west at Montreal and over to Ottawa. Nancy brought her books to study for her Microbiology class and her laptop for writing. They are leaving at dawn Monday (so Nancy will be back in time for our novel workshop).

And last night I drove up to a cinema multiplex at the Lincoln Mall (up in northern Rhode Island -- almost 45 miles -- about as far as you can possibly drive in a relatively straight line in Rhode Island without leaving the state). Our film was shown in a screening with eight other entries. As a Silent Film, our had no dialog Comparing it to the other eight, I think we clearly had the best direction and cinematography, and the best editing, and the best acting (by which I mean the marvelous actress who carried the movie and not my barely five seconds of screen time).

And now I am going to change and get down to the Y to do my circuit of the Nautilus equipment followed by either a treadmill or a stair-stepper -- too hot for running outside.




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