This summer is FIRED

... and really, it's barely started yet.

We had a massive storm system come through Friday night (apparently a derecho, which is the Spanish opposite of a tornado - tornadoes turn, you see, and derechos come right at you) which knocked out power to 1.3 million electricity customers just in the DC area (and many more along the path from Illinois eastward, but I think we got the worst of it). Our power was out for 46 hours, which was better luck than the hundreds of thousands of people who still don't have any. Friday was a record-setting heat day (104 in the city, 99 out here) and the following days haven't been much better. There have been deaths, it's all generally horrible, but this is about ME of course, and I am sitting in air conditioning now. Actually, aside from the nights, we (just me and Younger Son, the husband and other son being in Europe on vacation) managed to flit around to one air-conditioned spot after another (also seeking outlets to charge phones, and toilets that could be flushed. No water is the worst part of power outages). We saw two movies ("The Avengers" and "Brave"), hung out at the mall, etc. The outages were weirdly spotty; driving along we'd find every other traffic light was out. (I must say that drivers coped very well with multiple-lane intersections suddenly being governed by invisible stop signs. The only accident we saw all weekend was at a powered intersection.) All the food in the fridge had to go, of course, but I think the stuff in the chest freezer survived. I came down with an ear infection (nothing to do with the storm, but it didn't help).

So that was my weekend... hope you had better ones!

And along other lines...

In reference to the earlier discussion of fictive time-fiddling, I ran into an interesting bit in Bryant & May off the Rails (the most recent but one in Christopher Fowler's series, and the latest one I've read). Unlike my previous examples, it's in the text of the novel itself, not in an author's introduction, but Fowler does a lot of fourth wall-breaking in sneaky ways, so it's definitely authorial commentary on a confusing aspect of his series. It's probably self-explanatory (if I note that the book was published in 2010 and takes place at some point in the aughts, hence 60+ years from 1940, which is the ostensible setting (as flashback/memoir) of the majority of the first book in the series). Raymond Land is the Acting Head (1973-present) of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, and Arthur Bryant's continual foil.

( cut for length )

I'm not sure if this is more a reflection on time (Bryant and May are presented as being 22 and 19 respectively at the time of the first case (and both turned down for military service), and indefinitely elderly and far past retirement age in the present) or on memory and story-telling (what is truth?), but it's an intriguing addition to the genre.