Drying Out.

The sun's broken through this morning, and it did yesterday afternoon, too, but there's still a pervasive wetness out there, a kind of all-over damp. Additional ANYLF FayWatch fallout, discovered yesterday: water in the writing studios out back. It either came in over the slab or up through the slab, which as a result of rising ground water is possible, one more thing you don't think can be true but is. Water through concrete. It wasn't a ton of water, but it was enough to leave a very specific odor out there, which we're trying to mitigate with a kind of deep-south dehumidifier: run the A/C all day and all night and set a fan up in the open doorway. Seems to be working. We used to get water in there all the time, back before the big pre-marriage renovation and roof-fixing extravaganza. This is the first time we've had a breach since then. Hasn't rained like that since then, though, so it's hard to tell how worked up to get about all this. I'm going with Not So. For now, anyway. We did the bulk of the reno with this in mind: everything new is well up off the slab, and would be well up out of any water that got in. Seemed like a bit of a pain in the ass at the time, floating that floor up on top of plasticized decking. Now it seems like exactly the correct amount of pain-in-the-assedness.

I've never had an insurance adjuster look at anything other than the silver 1982 Honda Civic wagon I sported in high school, which I sported eventually into the side of a Chevy Cavalier after it pulled out in front of me on Roswell Road. I did love that car. I don't have really the same feelings about our roof, other than to say I love having one, but don't much care which kind. The roofer says that if we're fortunate, we'll get a whole new one. Maybe we can get alternating colors of shingles and spell out ANYLF up there. Or Have A Coke And A Smile. Or Obama 2008.

When I was a kid, I really wanted my parents to let me spell out SANTA LAND HERE in lights on our roof at Christmas. I've always loved Christmas lights. My brothers nixed the idea on technical and grammatical grounds before my mother could nix it on aesthetic ones: They felt like things might be confusing, like people might stop, might come up to the door, might be looking for SantaLand. Like they might think it was, say, here. Which is to say, there. I maintained that people would get it figured out just fine, but I lost. Maybe they were right. We live, after all, in the land of Tiny Party Peas and Huge Book Sales. Giant Cigarette Outlets. I like tiny parties just fine, and I love huge books. You can have your giant cigarettes. You might can have your rising ground water tables, too. I do love the weather. I think, though, that I like it better outside than inside.