With no warning, the Bay Area experiences the two hottest days of the year. Last night, self listened to newscast after newscast, all announcing with utmost awe: “This was the hottest day of the year!” Funny, just the weekend previous, self went shopping for plants, and all the nursery people she encountered complained how “short” and “cool” the summer was. Nowhere did self encounter a person who said, “We are going to have the two most sweltering days of the year — starting tomorrow!”
Result: all the plants self put in the ground yesterday got fried. Fried. Leaves as crisp as Calbee shrimp chips. She wouldn’t even pay 25 cents for those plants, let alone $4.50 each! Self ended up doing strategic re-positioning. She looked at her front yard, and noticed that the late afternoon sun was akin to the Sahara. And the front yard was baking. Even the trees offered no relief, for the late afternoon sun comes in at a slant (of course). So then self ended up digging new planting holes, in spots more protected from the sun. And she was so obssessed that she only noticed after she had set to work that she was wearing white jeans.
Self has six pairs of white jeans in her closet, none of which she has bought herself. All of them are from Loehman’s, courtesy of Dearest Mum. Hence, the cavalier treatment. One of them may even be Dolce & Gabbana.
Nevertheless. Self succeeded in moving her plants.
Now, she only has one thing to do by tomorrow. And that is write her book review of Ilustrado.
She of course has to prepare dinner (Oh, please let hubby come home late! As late as possible!). She sat down for a brief respite, and heard on the news that the economy was going to get worse. Much worse. In fact, the housing market is going down, down, dooown. So she called her Stanford Retirement Plan advisor, and he said: “Don’t you know that if you want rock-solid investments, you can pretty much expect 0 interest? Didn’t you know that?”
All self wanted to know was why she has less in her plan now than she did in 2003. Is that such an unreasonable question, dear blog readers? She was about to tell her advisor to move everything to a bond fund, and then her phone went “Beep! Beep!” And the battery went dead. The last thing she heard him saying was, “If you’ll just hold on a minute — ”
Bzzz! Fried.
It is so hot that Bella, self’s older beagle, hasn’t eaten for two days. She is, however, still alive, bushy-tailed, and alert. Which is more self can say of herself.
On lighter note, Gawker.com reports today that Catherine Keener kept Keanu Reeves waiting for half an hour in some New York locale. Result: he was cornered by a fan who asked him to pose for a picture and then spent the next moments frantically e-mailing the pic to the internet universe. Self only knows that if that had happened to her —
Self, the sun has fried your brain! You are not, self repeats N*O*T Keanu Reeves! So no need to worry about the “What if” of such a situation ever happening to you! You may stand around, for as much as an hour, and the most you will ever get is a suspicious glance from a security guard!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.