Lazy Day Cafe
Second Nature is kinda hosting!
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Wishes in their usual place
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Please recommend
(and unrecommend the Cafe/Lounge from earlier) |
May the 4’s be with you
37 Comments
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Wishes in their usual place
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Please recommend
(and unrecommend the Cafe/Lounge from earlier) |
How is everyone doing?
It’s cooled down into the eighties but the humidity is still way up there. I’m ready for fall.
We’re blah. No more Laura weather in the forecast and we don’t have any water pressure either (breaks in the county water line are a pretty common occurrence).
Do I have to come up there and bring my weather with me?
Are you anywhere near those freeway shootings? Yikes.
and the futon is always available.
The place where the guy was killed is about 15 miles south from the exit we take.
It’s too hot to be anything but lazy.
This afternoon I might gather up the laptop and head for the library. It’s two blocks away and has air conditioning and free wifi. Hard to beat that.
Poor Leo — I hope the concert was good though and he did Pamela Brown and his version of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.
He did Pamela Brown, but not Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. A lot of his pieces were instrumentals whose names I don’t know, but he did finish the show with “Ring Ring.”
Apparently this show went better than the last time he played the Zoo, though. He was talking about the last ZooTunes concert he did, when some kind of bird parked itself on the awning just above his head and started squawking, and squawked all the way through his music (but shut up between songs). He said he figured that because he was playing at a zoo he couldn’t just thump the awning to get rid of the bird — people would boo him. So he had to put up with it.
It was a good show but a bit shorter than the usual ZooTunes fare. He was supposed to be on a double bill with Leon Redbone, but Redbone cancelled so it was just Leo. It’s too bad — I really wanted to see Redbone — but I figure I got my money’s worth anyway. We had a nice picnic in the shade and got to hear some cool music. What more can you ask for? (Well, besides Bush being impeached, but some days you take what you can get.)
is a great place for days like this. Just wish I had a laptop — it’s on the list once my student loan check arrives.
Seriously, it’s a common tactic — you should see the downtown library here when it’s this hot out. It’s like a refugee camp.
I think I paid about $750 for mine. It’s a low-end Acer, and occasionally the cut corners show through. For instance the paint on the right touchpad button is wearing off. (Fix for that: Hook up a trackball to one of the USB ports.) But it looks nice and I have it set up to dual boot Linux and XP, so I can have an OS I can do stuff with, and an OS to play games on.
I haven’t done much of a hunt yet, but it’s approaching that time.
Of course, I also have about 15 bureaucratic things to take care of before they cut me the check — I’m one of those students that tends to make heads pop off in the financial aid office. I have like 130 units from community college (the fact that I did it all without financial aid doesn’t matter to them) and another 30 or so to go before I get the degree.
I’m also a little ashamed to admit that one of the biggest factors pushing me toward getting a new computer is that this one is now too slow to play any of the more recent (within the last 2-3 years) games on. But a laptop will be helpful anyway, and everywhere is getting wi-fi now.
Anymore it’s hard to justify getting a desktop unless you’re a business, or you have certain specific needs. I was reading recently that “desktop replacement laptops” is the fastest growing segment of the laptop market. My wife and I are looking to move into a smaller house in the next few years, and when we do we plan to just buy ourselves high-end laptops and set up a couple of central servers for things like printing, firewalling, stuff like that.
My laptop isn’t 100% desktop replacement material but since I’m running Linux on it most of the time that’s not a big concern. It’s “good enough” and that’s what I need right now. The only two real annoyances I’ve found so far with it are that it won’t burn DVDs (I have my “big beefy Tux box” for that) and that the video in Windows isn’t as fast as I’d like for playing Civilization IV.
We just bought some sort of Dell laptop thingey via Craigslist for my college age daughter for $350 – seems to be a good deal. She lives in a house with I think 5 other students and they couldn’t afford internet access, so this way she can take it to the library or a local hotspot and I won’t have to worry that she’s slacking off on her homework. Well I’ll still worry, but at least she’ll have to come up with a better excuse.
our downtown library actually had to shut down all weekend because the a/c died. Really sucks — it’s the only place I can think of that our sizable homeless population can go to cool off. If I were still a barista, I’d be handing out ice water to all passersby, but most businesses are not terribly patient with people who can’t buy anything.
And while sacto might be spared because we’re not on the general state grid, CA has a high risk of rolling blackouts today.
Growing up without AC I always loved walking the 3 miles to the library and hanging out in the coolness of the children’s room. I still think of that place when I open a book and smell the pages.
I grew up in the desert of eastern Washington so hot summers are nothing new. In fact I used to ride my bike about a mile to the library during the summer. I also lived in the basement, where it was generally cooler than outside; I don’t specifically remember us having air conditioning when I was growing up.
But having spent nine summers in Texas and having since become acclimatized to the Pacific Northwest, I have long since lost any tolerance for heat I may once have had.
Sacramento is not a good place to be with no air conditioning right now. It’s already almost 100 in our neighborhood at 11:13 am.
And it’s so unusually humid that my throw-myself-in-the-kiddie-pool-every-hour tactic is far less helpful than normal. Even my girlfriend, who I swear is part lizard, is complaining about the heat, and I don’t think either of us have really slept in like four days. Went to a cafe with a/c for a long time yesterday — it was filled with refugees from the heat — and all I wanted to do was sleep on their couch.
We’ve moved our sleeping stuff down to the basement, but it’s even hot down there.
I feel for you guys and hope it cools off soon. Here in the south I mostly just hibernate indoors with the AC in June, July and August. I’ll come out again when it drops below 85.
They claim it’ll cool down as the week progresses, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
In the meantime, we’re taking it very easy — I don’t think I’ve done a single productive thing this weekend — and escaping for air conditioned spaces in the afternoon at the peak. Went to the coast on saturday, and it was actually hot enough even on the beach to comfortably get in the ocean — a rare occurence here in the north. Even the dog, who is still pretty scared of waves, got in and ran around in the surf for a while.
There were people biking up hills in marin. Fucking loony. I used to train horses in the dead of summer, but this weather is dangerous for that kind of shit. This would be slow-trail-ride-to-the-creek weather.
This is get up and ride before 5 a.m. and quit by 9 a.m. weather.
But I guess we can be grateful that we’re not (I hope) roofers.
That’s got to be the worst job when it’s brutally hot out. Or a firefighter with 100# of equipment on.
I’d die. It’s 81° outside right now. It’s cooler than that here in the office, but only because I have a fan in the window running full blast. I shut down when the temperature gets much about 75°.
gardener died here yesterday. What really sucks is that so many people who do that kind of work can’t afford to take a day off. They live too much paycheck to paycheck.
I remember when our A/C at my bookstore/cafe died for a couple weeks in August, and I couldn’t afford not to go, and they couldn’t afford to close — that wasn’t even laboring out in the sun. Some jackass came in and ordered a hot beverage, though, and I just said “sorry, no, if I steam anything right now, I’m going to vomit”. He got huffy and went to the cafe down the block. Good riddance.
That’s really awful. I had a good friend who was a roofer and in weather like this they would start at 3 a.m. and work till about 9 a.m.
When I was a kid, we had small store and used to have a three-day tent sale at the end of every July — the misery of those memories still gives me visceral discomfort decades later and I still hate to even go inside a tent.
Not a camper, eh?
Who needs tents to camp — sleeping bags and bivy sacks work fine (but I don’t camp anymore).
expecting a high of 92 — tomorrow it’s supposed to be only 81, then back down to the high 70s late in the week, quite liveable IMNSHO.
Spent the morning in a not-so-airconditioned office at church…mainly answering phones and trying to keep from being too bored. Got one more day tomorrow to put in then I’ve earned my Brownie points for the week. 🙂 Plus, it actually gets me up, dressed, and out of the apartment before noon; now I just need to do that on the days I’m not volunteering.
Omir — where in Eastern WA? My mom-in-law grew up in Spokane, though she hasn’t been there in about 50-odd years…know any Robinsons?
Okay, off to grab my water bottle out of the fridge then see what I’ve missed on the blogs…
I wanted to stop in and give you a huge thank you for sending me that copy of Motherless Daughters. Yes, you did find a jewel on the used bookshelf! I bought the book when it first came out but years later I gave my copy to a new motherless daughter who I thought surely needed it more than I did. It is considered to be the Bible now for Motherless Daughters….there hasn’t been a work of literature before it or since to compare to it when it comes to being female and motherless. There is something quite magical though about you friend and I just can’t put my finger on it. I will attempt to explain though. When a daughter loses a mother there are certain anniversaries that arise that can create a lot of chaos and confusion for the motherless. Women have walked out on their own children and left marriages being unable to define what it is that they are feeling and not finding anybody around them that is able to relate to them. They feel terrified and isolated and can do some really crazy things. These anniversaries are when a daughter reaches the age that her mother was when she died. Sometimes motherless daughter’s have done an Elvis Presley and committed a very subtle suicide and have people standing around scratching their heads that they “died” at the same age that their mother did…..because they couldn’t conceive as a woman who they would be after that age. Others just freak out. The book wasn’t out yet when I reached 26 so I went through that whole year completely terrified that something sinister would fall from the sky and land on me and that would be it. It even affected my daughter who remembers being little and being scared that something was going to “kill” me. The other anniversary is when a woman’s children reach the same age that she was when she lost her mother. I thankfully had the book when my daughter turned seven and it made all the difference in the world knowing how and why I felt some of the strange things that I felt sometimes. I will experience this same sort of thing though to a diminishing degree with each of my children that I give birth to but I no longer have my book to thumb through during stormy feeling days because I passed mine on to a newer survivor. This is where your odd sort of magic that I have experienced before comes in……very odd that you found the book and mailed it to me as Joshua will turn seven in January. I am forever blessed to have you for a friend and I send you all my love. Sorry this is so long but it was required.
Back at you Tracy. I paged through it and read little passages and it seemed really good. I’m glad it has helped you through the years and that you again have your own copy! Give that little dude a hug for me. 🙂
Vacation and neither kid wants to step outside.
Washed the car yesterday after 4pm and after 10 minutes… I thought I was gonna fall over.
First time I’d washed the Honda since long before we left CA, so it has all that drive crap on it from moving… I forgot my car was white.
And yes I used biodegradable car wash and only one half bucket of wash. And used very little water.
Of course my son went and got more suds on a panel we had just washed and rinsed. Figures. Always happens 🙂
to wash my car. I think the muck might be the only thing holding the thing together these days.
In fact, I seriously don’t think I’ve washed it in about two years now. Just the necessary windows.
Yeah, I think it had been over a year.
Some guy came to the house last week selling some car gunk be gone cleaner crap… we didn’t want any. He went over and wiped clean a big spot on the passenger door. Left a big white spot on my car. The phucker!
Then I HAD to wash it.
My engine is making weird noises… but bills, bills and other bills to pay first. ACK
Man oh man I would take any money to be living in SAC right now. I feel for ya. I just moved from N. Calif, just north of Calistoga. It’s HOT there. But.. not as hot as Sacramento. You poor thing.
you’re in portland, right? It rains there pretty damn often, right? Why would you wash your car when the weather gods are giving them away for free?
Well, we tried that. Several times, Andi.
There’s something about driving from Cali to OR on I-5… four times pre-move… that makes that gunk stick on. 🙂
Well there’s my problem — I have a too high gunk tolerance and am willing to wait until enough rain wetting it and wearing it away and enough sun drying it out make it flake off and blow away.
When the kids slid up against the car, they sometimes got dirty… I could live with that.
But when they would STICK to the car… 🙂
This is freaking hilarious. MSOC posted it on her site. Its’ on the Steeley Dan website.
Letter to Luke Wilson
Like, for real man, like it’s funny, okay. 😀
Happy Hour open.