Morning

Had lunch with the flower_cat yesterday at Bravo Fono. They seem to be more generic European than their original Hungarian these days, but we still managed to find gulyas and langos on the menu. Their gulyas is a soup rather than a stew, and langos is deep-fried bread served with a clove of garlic, which you rub on the outside. Yum. Then we ended up having sushi for dinner, after the Younger Daughter brought home a fantastically good set of grades. (Whether she can keep it up is another question.)

Went to bed early-ish, a little after 11pm, and woke up at 5:30 after a night of bad dreams (mostly about some ghastly convention(?) banquet where we kept getting switched from table to table in a huge dining hall).

In other news, I'm still getting used to the new version of my LJ client, ljupdate, which I've hacked to turn off auto-formatting. Sometimes it screws things up, like the formatting on the recent "pirate name" meme.

They're predicting thunderstorms for today, but so far they haven't arrived.

A change in the weather

Today was officially the first day of The Wet Season. Here in California we don't have the usual four seasons, a fact that confused and bothered me no end for the first few years I was out here. We have two: Wet and Dry, roughly divided by the equinoxes. During the Dry season, it rarely rains; non-native plants die if you don't irrigate them, and the hills acquire a color that natives call "golden". During the Wet season it rains occasionally; the hills turn green. Leaves fall off the non-native trees that haven't yet evolved to handle California's version of a growing season, and the kids who have never driven in rain before (and a good number of adults who ought to know better) get into trouble on roads that are suddenly slippery with a layer of water over a season's worth of oil drippings. Luckily I avoided them this year.

Thor arrived in Menlo Park with his thunder and lightning, about half an hour after I got back from my lunchtime walk. It was clear again when I left for home; I ran into a downpour with about a third of my trip left to go. There are microclimates in the Bay Area; it was raining only lightly when I got home to San Jose.

I like the rain, the thunder, and especially the lightning. It's about time.

Insensitive marketing, Amethyst Rose,

Possibly painful stuff. flower_cat, expecting parents, et. al. please skip.

Every once in a while, amid all the horror and tragedy of a world full of war, natural disaster, and human cruelty, you run across something totally unrelated that touches you in a way a half a million homeless refugees and their shattered lives cannot.

( OK, you were warned, as if the icon weren't warning enough )

I'm OK, really. Thanks for listening. Or not, if you skipped the cut tag.