Previous - 182. Of this and that
My Name Is...
I'm liking the meditative pacing of this novel. There's not much of a plot so far. The protagonist is stuck in the hospital and her mother, who she never sees, has come to stay with her. They converse and then there are sections either about her childhood or about her life after she left home, either before or after the hospital stay. Meanwhile here in SF the pavement is damp.
We were warned by the meteorologists that the pavement might get damp today, and now it's happened. (Bystander to news person: "This is such a quiet and dry neighborhood, this sort of thing never happens around here. Since all those high-tech hipsters started moving in everything has been going down hill. I'd move if I could").
I'd heard that Arizona, or at least Tucson, was having a particularly vigorous monsoon, and it's gotten so vigorous that it has been drenching SoCal and now dampening our pavements. Is nothing sacred? To add injury to insult, there's not enough moisture to wash the sidewalks clean, but the air is humid enough to bring out the smell of urine and shit. The weather is supposed to return to normal by Sunday.
Strout got me again. Right after saying there was no plot, I hit her describing a traumatic incident from their childhood -- mostly involving her dad and her brother, but of course the remainder of the family also. The hints about her father are coming so slowly that I thought, after the PTSD from an incident in WW2, that she was done. But no.
And there was just an incident where we saw how rude it could be to psychoanalyze someone based on their reaction to something, so now we see her father's nasty reaction to catching his son wearing women's clothes and how can we not think, "Hmmm?" Could he really be both closeted and suffering from PTSD? It does make a sort of sense.
Work
For some reason, there is always a slow work patch here in August. It should only be this weekend that I'm not working, but I'm skipping the big Outside Lands concert again this year, too, which will make it two weekends in a row. There's a slight chance I will pick-up a Monday shift right after the concert, but I really don't like back-end, table sorting. Especially eight straight hours of it. This is what I work hard at the front-end to avoid, but we don't do the front-end for OL.
I think the real reason I'm even considering taking the Monday shift is that I suddenly realized there are only two months left of the 2017 event season. And since Moscone Center (our convention center) is currently torn apart in the latest expansion effort, the big conventions that usually follow the event season will not be happening here this year. 2017 is becoming rather like a book when you notice you are in the second to last signature of the binding.
There are the two big events I look forward to (train for) all year -- the Dragon Boat Races and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass -- and a couple other events that can be fun or a pain -- the big one being Art & Soul in Oakland in two weeks. Beyond that, some other things will probably appear on the schedule, maybe even after HSB, but the end is almost in sight.
A couple days ago I heard people upstairs and went up to investigate, it was my neighbor and his son trying to decide what to do with the floor of the unit, as they try to rent the place out. The son is about my age and the father in his early 80s with some heart problems, but otherwise he and his wife are still going strong. But the son is supposed to be taking over the business of the condo rental. They are both very much alike, so it seems to be going pretty smoothly, but it's odd to see that particular father making way for his son. He too seems to have a sense of the end coming into view.
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