...and thought it was running around 8-ish, but it was still 73. Heh.
The air is so dry, though. It's a trade-off: we get cooler evenings out of the deal, but it hasn't rained for a couple of weeks and we need it. Independence Day is in a bit more than 2.5 weeks; I'm not going to want to light many bottle rockets if it hasn't rained some before then.
Once when I was 5, I spent the day over at a friend's house; when I came happily skipping homeward around dinnertime--
Well, I infer that I wasn't allowed down the street and had to go back to my friend's house. I have only the most vague of memories about nearly everything before 1982, and only singular circumstances really stand out. And I was five.
The thing is, the empty field across the street from my house had caught fire. A pretty large area burned, and the fire department had naturally come out to put the fire out before it could spread. That's why I infer the street was blocked; they certainly weren't going to let a little kid wander unsupervised around an area where there was a(n admittedly small) wildfire burning.
I do vaguely remember not being able to go home and being disappointed at not getting to see what all the fire trucks were doing. I was only allowed home after all the action was over. The giant semicircular patch of charred earth was an impressive sight to a 5-year-old.
This field had paths through it, because it was the shortest distance to the elementary school for some of us, and because a lot of local kids who had mini bikes and dirt bikes would ride them in that field. And my sister had been riding her (pretty new) Suzuki TS-90 dirt bike around the field shortly before the fire started....
The dirt bike wasn't the cause. It's got a spark arrestor in its tailpipe. No, the real cause was the guy from the local neighborhood, who'd been hanging around tossing firecrackers. Yeah: big surprise that if you throw something which is burning into dry grass you might cause a fire.
*sigh*
The place where Sailor V and I generally light fireworks (but for last year) is surrounded by open fields, and in any given year one or two of them is fallow. In drought conditions like the ones prevailing now, I hesitate to toss burning objects around essentially at random.
This being the case, this year I'm probably going to lean heavily towards fountains, cakes, and other ground fireworks that work best on pavement. Roman candles--you can direct the fire, unlike rockets and mortars, and make sure the missiles fly over pavement.
And have plenty of water on hand.
The last thing I want to have to do is call the fire department and then explain to a sheriff why I'm lighting fireworks in the middle of a drought. It's just not worth it.
* * *
In the "the cat's not stupid" department:
My bedroom--which is where I spend most of my time, anyway, since the computer and blab slab are in here--is naturally the least-efficiently ventilated room in the house.
When I open the windows and put fans in them to cool the place off, my room can be approaching 60°...and the rest of the house can be twenty degrees warmer. I can have the back door open with a fan in it to pull the air through, and still the cold air will not pass the threshold of my bedroom door. I have to put a fan in the doorway to pull the cool air through it, and then the air will begin moving and the temperature in the rest of the house will drop.
No, I don't understand it. Two windows, two fans, both forcing air into my room from outside--you'd think the very slight overpressure would tend to make air move out of the room and down the hall, towards the open back door, but no, because why physics?
The same problem prevails when the room is too warm and I wish to cool it via air conditioning. (Or, in winter, when it's too cold and I wish to warm it.) The air from the HVAC system has an inordinate amount of trouble getting this far, and it just does not move in or out of the room, so I end up having either to set a fan in the doorway, or wait for convection and radiation to change the temperature.
Guess which I choose.
...so there's a fan sitting there blowing cool air into my room, and--this is the part about the cat, I didn't forget--my cat was laying in front of it, all flopped out and having a bath.
* * *
Last night, Ormusia joined a guild. Besides that, I was running her around Westfall, and for the first time in her life she saw a draenei.
So she asked the draenei woman where she got her cool shoes; and the draenei said she'd gotten them in a dungeon. So Ormusia (going on her way) began prattling to herself about how she couldn't wait to Q for a dungeon herself in order to get "hoofy shoes".
After she hit 15th, I immediately queued for a random, and Ormusia was happy about it. This was the result, sung to the tune of the theme from The Mickey Mouse Show:
Hoofy shoes!It gets worse, because now she's started referring to the draenei as "hoofy people". So when she came across Vin in Stormwind (do a quest and get a free balloon!) she referred to her as the "little hoofy girl".
Hoofy shoes!
Ormusia's getting hoofy shoes!
She'll Q for a dungeon and then she'll get hoofy shoes!
H-O-O
F-E-Y
S-H-O-E-S!
Needless to say, Ormusia did not get "hoofy shoes" out of the dungeon since DRAENEI HAVE HOOVES AND HUMANS DO NOT but it's all so damned ludicrous it amuses me to no end.
Further, druids? "Magic bears". You read that the same way you'd read "water fountain"--they're bears which do magic, not bears which are inherently magical. "Druids can take other forms," a fellow guildie said with a bit of exasperation.
"Ormusia knows! Then they're magic cats or magic birds! One time Ormusia saw a magic...walrus-thingy."
The guild she joined is named "Fragment" and the GM's alt is an ADHD woman. There was a bit of an RP event and it was fun; then I got involved in an ad hoc one in Stormwind Cathedral, with a crazy woman, an elf, and a paladin. It was a scream, but I was getting hypoglycemia and needed to make some food.
(Hamburgers again. I think I've got the formula down, now. Garlic powder for great justice!)
Anyway, via RP I established that Ormusia is not perilously stupid; she has a pocket dictionary to which she refers when she can't remember how to say "the hard words"--but once it's put away the word gets mangled into unintelligibility again.
The "magic bear" she was talking to at the guild RP event asked, "Why not say 'scribe'?" when she mangled the hell out of "inscriptionist". So now she's Ormusia the scribe.
This toon is a hoot.