[Original post on this date. Remain without power. Will add more to Beryl posts when power is restored.]
Today’s first comfort read from Mary Stewart was Rose Cottage. I’m sure I read this one, though it was like reading it for the first time. There was a sort of twist to it that reminds me of an important plot point in the Neverending Saga. I let the readers know pretty quickly (second novel) what most of the characters don’t know. Mary Stewart saves hers for the very end after teasing the readers with suspense.
Speaking of cottages, I dragged some big tree limbs and a lot of other branches off of Debby’s patio. As a result, she’s starting to make Fairy Cottage look a little more normal.
The daily showers are bringing the temperatures down a little. That’s more helpful than you can imagine unless you’ve experienced Houston in July.
My second comfort read was the Mary Stewart novel that used to be Debby’s favorite (may still be), Touch Not The Cat. A big storm figures into this novel, too. Timely.
Last year’s tropical storm (well, it was a hurricane Hillary) rains and floods also created huge lakes in what would normally be the “white hot heat of the noon day sun in the merciless hell of a waterless desert” (from a Danger Mouse cartoon) called Death Valley (hint, hint, you’d think that name would say something to someone going there in the hot season).
Those lakes slowly evaporated will into the temperate winter like a swamp cooler. When the Death Valley park was opened up again, people would flock there to see Death Valley Lakes. Also, the air conditioning bill for late hot season was dramatically reduced as the hot season cooled to a less hot season (more like an actual summer).
I wish that would happen again here, as we’ve been in the mid to upper 110s off-and-on. Sometimes, it gets back into the far upper end of the FM radio station numbers. But also, that hurricane/tropical storm put a good sized dent in the fire season, so every cloud [can (sometimes) have] a silver lining, ramble, ramble, cliche, ramble…
I would never make it in the desert.
As long as the Electricity flows, that imaginary infinitely deep ocean abyss of underground water under the desert that keeps getting pumped up for drinking and cooling and minerals and some stupid pistachio farm…, etc., life somehow survives as it hangs on a thread over a bed of 118 degrees. next to Death Valley Lakes.
Anyway, Death Valley Lakes sounds like the perfect name for a future retirement/hospital/funeral parlor chain that really aught to be situated on those dried up lake beds in Death Valley.