My nice lady friend was about for most of this weekend, which was good. I haven't noticed much of her moods, but she tolerates mine quite well, so...score.

God damn, I hate summer. Hate. I spend the entire season wishing it were over, the more so since I moved to California where it never fucking rains. When I was younger I was forced by circumstance to appreciate summer as the time when I wasn't in school, but underneath, it's always been endless days and afternoons of being too sunny and hot for me to think or move or do anything, and endless nights of being too hot to sleep. Inactivity followed by insomnia: I don't understand what's wrong with people who think that's a fine and beautiful thing.

Well, I do understand: they're different from me. But no one's perfect, and I forgive them.

Apparently it's a nationwide heat wave (I just saw the news this afternoon). If it doesn't break by next week, I'm going to die on the drive through the desert to Colorado, let alone trying to do aikido a few hours a day at 6000 feet.

I just traced the route there and back, road by road. Holy shit, we are going through some of the most godforsaken boondocks this country has to offer, plus swinging by the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams, and Las Vegas. How long did it take her to plan this?

I went to a friend's game night on Tuesday. I don't normally go, since I much prefer just seeing her, but I hadn't seen her in a while and it would be nice for her, since she's leaving that apartment. And I had a great time, but it was a little odd because we played SPANC. I'd never heard of it before, but one of the attendees was a founder of furry fandom, which he says veered off back in the early 80s because, and I quote, "mainstream scifi fandom wasn't kinky enough for us". (Many of these people have sex while in animal costume. I am not making this up. I've met them.) Given that furries face a uniform barrage of derision in every community I've ever talked to--to pretty much everyone else, no matter their sexual proclivities, furries are weird, an impression rarely contradicted by meeting one--I had to suppress my normal wisecracking habits and be more diplomatic. He was a nice guy, and not terribly weird or awkward, as things go.

But. Furry.