It's been a terribly busy month for our hero (who in excessive homage to Greek theater has a number of tragic flaws, and for a twist is not really nobly-born), and things don't look to calm down until after Burning Man at the end of this month. Life starts to look vaguely reasonable starting in September, except for the part where my job with UCSB ends on September 30th and I have to find more work.
The weekend of August 2nd (just over a week ago now) I went to Atlanta for my cousin Zeb's wedding. Well, it was in Marietta, which is a large and fairly well-to-do suburb of Atlanta, but I imagine most people don't know that; I only know because I went to college with a couple of people from Marietta. The heat was impressive, although not worse than I remember from two decades in New England. On Sunday I found myself with some time to kill before leaving, and I was all set to walk the mile or so into the Old Marietta Square, but about forty feet out the door I realized that the town square is not fascinating enough to be worth the heat. I spent the day reading and shooting some pool in the hotel pub.
Zeb belongs to one of the West Coast branches of my family, up near Seattle. His dad (my uncle) does prostate cancer research for the VA, and his mom does something for the Forest Service. They've been sort of disconnected from the East Coast people over the years, so this was maybe the third or fourth time I'd seen any of them. But I like them, they're a lot of fun, and I got to see Mom and Dad, which is always nice--sometimes I think I actually see them more often this past year than I did when I was in college. I think it was good to have some more people from the groom's side there: the wedding consisted mostly of the bride and her family and friends, and for Zeb's end it was just a few members of my family and a bunch of his fraternity brothers.
A somewhat-shady character tried to shark me on the pool tables on Saturday night. I watched him play a professional-quality game against one of the frat brothers (who was also a pro--lemme tell you, there's nothing quite like watching two sharks go at it), then watched as he played two otherwise-believably-bad games against me, matching my bad play shot for shot. He had originally told me his wife made him stop putting money on games (that might be true, there was a woman with him and I think I saw her lecturing him later on), and then he tried to talk me up from a beer to ten dollars to bet on a game. I passed both times, since I'd seen him play before.
I brought Mona down to Santa Barbara with me last week. I suspect she was bored some part of the time, although she did get some tan at the beach. Work is...suffering, I think, from my various other problems.
Not that anything is really going well.
Hi, just call me Eyeore.
How are you?