I apologize for being a little generally cranky here. But I’ve (a) got a cold and (b) have got pretty well fed up with the weather here. It’s been hot, yes, and I’m not complaining about that per se. It’s summer here, and there’s a longstanding tradition of hot days in the summertime. The summer we didn’t have hot days just felt worse. But the weather forecast has been predicting thunderstorms for “tomorrow and the day after” for a solid week now. So far the closest we’ve gotten to a thunderstorm is one of the fireworks my love’s father set off turned out to still be smouldering when we went out to the car an hour later so I poured a bucket of water on it. At this point I think the whole thunderstorm thing is a bluff. The only way we’re getting any rain is to hire a bunch of schoolchildren to draw rainy scenes and tape their drawings to the windows. Meanwhile I’m not buying any so-called weather forecast that says there’s rain coming.