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constanceGod, am I just perimenopausal, or is there something more insidious (or, for that matter, less insidious) at work here? I mentioned yesterday that I'd forgotten all the interesting things I'd meant to post after I returned to lj -- and today I was on my way back to work after a half-day seminar and thought of at least two things of note to say tonight, and now I can remember neither of them. I cannot seem to keep anything in my head for longer than two minutes, any more, and it's starting to unnerve me a little. I'll spend that same two minutes searching feverishly for a word which I know I know, but is somehow escaping me, only to have it saunter into my brain twenty minutes later when I've stopped looking for it. Oh, were you looking for me? it says with a faint sneer. sorry, but I have better things to do than wait around for you all day.
So I don't have those things to report, I'm sorry to say. But here are two other things:
(1) I've never lived in the midst of a serious drought before. I come from a land where we consider a summer day without rain to be anomalous, where the humidity is so high that your glasses fog over the second you walk out the door in the morning, where wildfires are so rare as to be unheard of. And here is usually not much better -- your glasses don't fog up, you don't break an immediate sweat upon walking outside, but 80% humidity is, in those not from Louisiana, I believe still considered to be high humidity. This spring, though: no rain, no rain. We are having chilly desert nights and sweltering desert days. Our lips are cracking. We are waking up to smoke drifting north from a hundred miles away through cloud-free air, so thick that we can smell it, so thick that we are convinced that someone is burning something a couple of doors down. We are watching what looks like the apocalypse on our nightly news.
And wherever your peaches are coming from this year, they're probably not coming from here. I wish it would rain.
(2) After learning a seriously staggering amount (but not nearly enough) about COBRA/HIPAA at my morning seminar, I was allowed to sustain myself with the best lunch I've had in a really long time. Salad with a substantial strawberry vinaigrette dressing. Pecan-crusted chicken with a drizzle of hollandaise, wild rice, four perfect asparagus stalks. Turtle cheesecake topped with feather-light chocolate mousse. It almost made up for the fact that every single one of the dozens of people at that seminar had been doing things exactly wrong for ages. Most of us ate our lovely lunches around the remnants of the shell-shocked expressions we'd worn all morning.
After lunch, I walked out of the meeting rooms by way of the pool, and thought wistfully of last summer, when I got to swim (the tradeoff being, of course, that one is generally not paid for swimming, and one must eventually be paid). I watched the lifeguards whistling at the kids (who were all much too overstimulated to walk) running along the sides of the pool, and wished I were one of them.
So I don't have those things to report, I'm sorry to say. But here are two other things:
(1) I've never lived in the midst of a serious drought before. I come from a land where we consider a summer day without rain to be anomalous, where the humidity is so high that your glasses fog over the second you walk out the door in the morning, where wildfires are so rare as to be unheard of. And here is usually not much better -- your glasses don't fog up, you don't break an immediate sweat upon walking outside, but 80% humidity is, in those not from Louisiana, I believe still considered to be high humidity. This spring, though: no rain, no rain. We are having chilly desert nights and sweltering desert days. Our lips are cracking. We are waking up to smoke drifting north from a hundred miles away through cloud-free air, so thick that we can smell it, so thick that we are convinced that someone is burning something a couple of doors down. We are watching what looks like the apocalypse on our nightly news.
And wherever your peaches are coming from this year, they're probably not coming from here. I wish it would rain.
(2) After learning a seriously staggering amount (but not nearly enough) about COBRA/HIPAA at my morning seminar, I was allowed to sustain myself with the best lunch I've had in a really long time. Salad with a substantial strawberry vinaigrette dressing. Pecan-crusted chicken with a drizzle of hollandaise, wild rice, four perfect asparagus stalks. Turtle cheesecake topped with feather-light chocolate mousse. It almost made up for the fact that every single one of the dozens of people at that seminar had been doing things exactly wrong for ages. Most of us ate our lovely lunches around the remnants of the shell-shocked expressions we'd worn all morning.
After lunch, I walked out of the meeting rooms by way of the pool, and thought wistfully of last summer, when I got to swim (the tradeoff being, of course, that one is generally not paid for swimming, and one must eventually be paid). I watched the lifeguards whistling at the kids (who were all much too overstimulated to walk) running along the sides of the pool, and wished I were one of them.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 01:54 am (UTC)