I’ve had better weekends.
I got a lot of website work done, but I felt like a captive trapped in the upstairs Sunday. The heat was just as oppressive as Saturday, the only thing we did downstairs all day Sunday was make and eat dinner, after which I was all sweaty and had to go back upstairs (thank goodness Michael did the dishes!).
Saturday afternoon I went out to check the mail, and decided to figure out what the shiney thing at the end of our driveway was. It had been there for over a month, I figured it was some small piece of plastic or something, but as I approached I noticed it was a cat collar for “Merlin.” The collar had contact information for Merlin’s family. Merlin lives just a couple doors down, and I considered just walking over but instead gave the number a call. I got an interesting answering machine message:
“Sorry I\u2019m not here to take your call, I\u2019m out trying to make enough money to take care of all my cats!”
Oh great, a crazy cat lady! Regardless I left her my name, address and phone number, letting her know I had her cat’s collar.
She called me back Sunday evening, just as the sky was darkening and it was looking to rain. We met in my driveway, she was a thin, normal-looking middle-aged woman. She was surprised that I’d found the collar, and amused that it wasn’t even the most recent one he’s lost. Mostly she was really nice and happy to meet a neighbor. We spoke for a few minutes until the wind picked up and the rain swept in.
The rain. I was excited to have a thunderstorm. The weekend had been so miserably hot and the storm brought in some really intense winds. The thunder shook the house, the power flickered a few times before completely going out around 7pm.
So we abandoned out computers, shut down the beeping UPSes and headed downstairs. Luckily the rain had cooled down the air enough to make it tolerable. Michael got some candles and we made some cocktails. I spent the evening reading by candle-light and Michael played his drums. It was quite relaxing.
The power came back on around 9:15pm. It was somewhat disappointing. Our primary server for mail and web stuff shut down properly (it’s hooked up the UPS and so it knows when the power goes out) but some things broke when it came back up. Michael spent the rest of the evening working to fix that. I hopped on IRC to find our hub on Xelium completely down, but there was nothing I could do about it so I just went to bed (later finding out that just after the hub came back up the server was attacked by a botnet, arg! What a night!).
And now it’s Monday. The weather is cooler, it’s gray out. Mmmm perfect. I’m in a good mood.