Pop-Up.

By six o'clock last night I'd all but given up on the prospect of rain, but it was cloudy, so AMR and I sallied forth into the sponge that was yesterday evening to dump dead and dying petunias out of the front pots and replace them with some portulaca—big goings on around here at ANYLF. Serious doings. But that is not the point. The portulaca looks nice out there—also called purslane by professionals and hobbyists alike—but that is not the point. This is the point: Give or take right on top of us to a mile or so south and east of us, a fairly large thunderstorm did appear largely out of nowhere (and/or it formed right along a little trough that had been nudging Piedmontward all day, but who really needs science at a time like this?) and gave us an easy quarter-inch, and gave the folks south and east quite the thunder-and-lightning situation. If you lived even just downtown, but surely out 70 a ways, you probably saw an inch or better. If you lived here, then you saw it rain on your freshly watered pots for a little while, and listened to it bang away on those lucky souls who live on the next farm over. But it rained, and a day with rain is rainier than a day without, and it's August, as aforementioned in this very space, friends and fans of the forward march of time and seasons, so let us not complain, alright?

Whatever weed and tree situation it is that's growing in the gutters of my writing shed has really taken off since the uphill mouse cut down the trees that formerly and so nicely shaded me out there.

Bill still looks like something to look at. Our morning fog has burned off. The cicadas are going double-time. Precious few weeks left to make more cicadas, is my guess. Humid. Hot. I'm right on the edge of pining, really pining, for an evening where a flannel shirt makes sense. But that means going back to the puppet show out there at Fancypants Polytechnic Institute for the Advancement of Pedagogic Stratagems and General Malaise, and I'm not quite keen on that just yet. So, fine. If it has to be pasta-water hot for me to have another week off, I'll take it. I will water my portulaca and I will hope for afternoon storms and I will lock my jaw down in a death-dealing grip on these last ten days of August and try not to think about much of anything except how in hell to drag one more paragraph out of the thing that threatens to be a novel out there in the newly sunbaked shed.