August Vacations 2012

I have gone through three week-long vacations this month, and I now anticipate no time off until the end of September and Museum Days.

The drought that has endured through June and July is now over, as least for me. The normal sequence of summer storms in the afternoon have returned, even if they cannot now fill up our area’s deficit of rain. This means I can mow my lawn, which is nice and green on the south ⅔ of my yard.

At first, the north ⅓ was still brown and parched, probably due to a combination of lack of trees on that side of the lawn and poor clayish soil (the reason for the lack of trees). Trees die on that side of the lawn. Three had already died when I first moved to my house. One has died this summer. Now I have the decaying stumps of three trees and the brown and dry rampike of a fourth dead tree.

That rampike is still there; I had arranged to remove it, but cancelled out after Madre insisted that I keep the tree, at least until next spring.

As I did sign up for staff lounge duty in July despite my vacations, I had been coming in during the afternoons to clean the table tops and microwave ovens, replenish the ice cube tray, and drain the urn. On the last Thursday I helped clean out the staff refrigerator. On Friday my cleanup was interrupted by an alarm — the second one, I am told, that day.

On the second vacation I made a daytrip to Purdue University. Like other daytrips, I walked the campus, ate at Pappy's, and visited the shops. I have found during this particular daytrip that:

1. During a drought, plants are smaller and flowers are less colorful, no matter how much you water them. I saw this at the Horticultural Area and on the so-called green roof of the student services building. That brings up a problem with green roofs that are supposed to save on energy: In dry areas and droughts, what you save on juice you expend on water.
2. The sapling maze sculpture in the Agricultural Mall is becoming overgrown with green weeds that block parts of the maze.
3. Pappy’s french fries are really good.
4. There is a Library of Congress Code section of the undergraduate library. Evidently Purdue's libraries are making tentative steps down that path that the Bracken had completed long ago. It seems that section contains all new stuff, including a special edition of Ghost World, which I bought later at Von’s.
5. The undergraduate library has a more restricted set of guest workstations than the Bracken. Their print job release stations use Pharos, and they charge a vital organ for print jobs.
6. The University Bookstore no longer sells O'Reilly books, as they traditionally did, probably because the local hackerdom buy them online now, and because the titles the store had during my last few visits were more and more out of date.

Other than the daytrip, the last vacation was uneventful.

I met the new neighbor next door on Fourth. He was glad at the chance to move out of a house on state road 26 and get away from the road noise and traffic.

I have just learned that one of the trustees of the local library board has passed on. She seemed all right last month, but did not attend the last meeting a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea that she was ill. I will visit the wake tomorrow after work.