The Week Time Stood Still

We are in the midst of the true dog days of summer here.

Life has seemingly slowed to a lazy crawl as we've been in the usual July/August swoon at work with very little of interest happening on the new release front. The Indians have been stuck in the same offensive rut since the All-Star Break, and they seem to take the field and wind up playing the same offensively-bereft ballgame time and time again. Even the twin financial dramas here (me attempting to keep my new dental expenditures from eating me alive and Sarah looking for a new job outside of Case) seem to be playing out at the pace of a Wim Wenders movie.

All that said, I suppose the lack of urgency or panic in our lives these days is worth noting in the "pro" column (though Sarah is justifiably pretty worried about how things will pan out for her over the next few weeks), though the weather has most certainly been a "con" as of late. All of you who know me well are well aware that I'm a huge fan of warmer climes, but this week has been a real beast. Stepping outside of work on Tuesday when the sun briefly burned through the permanent overcast was kind of like taking a nature walk on the surface of Venus. Even at this late hour, the air outside is oppressively thick and so moist it feels like you needed gills to breathe. There is a thick cover of fog just off the ground and around the sodium vapor street lights almost every night. There is no breeze, no cool natural relief of any kind: the only time the air moves at all is when another torrential rainstorm plows through the area (we've been making up for a bone dry last couple of months here lately) and even that does little more than re-juice the atmosphere for the next one.

Ah, if I had the free time and gas budget (and a less irritating car stereo speaker problem), this would be an ideal time for a late-night drive ... but the responsibilities of work (and trying to finish the terribly tedious endeavor of transferring data from 500 CD-Rs to a 500 gig My Book external hard drive) must take precedence this evening. Maybe this weekend, assuming it dries up a bit.

I did say "assuming."