By William Carlos Williams
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.
--------
Hurricane Irene knocked out our power several times during the night, making the sump pump stop working and causing the cats to thunder all over the house each time, which woke me up repeatedly. Paul kept getting up to check that the sump pump wasn't overflowing and woke me up some more. So I was pretty out of it on Sunday and had little energy. We had planned to take Adam and a friend to Kings Dominion for a last blast before school started on Monday, but Kings Dominion was closed, as were Six Flags and many other local attractions. Daniel had sent a message telling us he needed a different wireless card to access the secure network on campus and that he'd forgotten the case for his eyeglasses, so we decided to run those over to him, then go to Great Falls. Unfortunately, there were so many trees down in that part of the state that we had to drive through traffic lights that didn't work, but we managed to get his stuff to him.
This skink ran out of a storm drain at the University of Maryland.
When Adam knelt down to take a photo of it, it ran right over his leg!
The small creek that runs by the agricultural college's farm was very swollen.
Though the university kept its power (other than failures in the campus-wide fire alarm system), much of the county around it did not, meaning many stores were closed and traffic lights were out.
However, though the official national park web site hadn't said so, Great Falls was closed -- there were barriers up and we could see branches and leaves all over the road leading to it. So we stopped at the Bethesda Co-op, then came home so Adam could walk the neighbor's dogs. Both Adam and his friend had been talking about having gone to a birthday party at the local restaurant Plaza Azteca, so although we adults had never been there, we decided to take them there for dinner. Adam had summer math homework to finish in the evening -- naturally, he waited till the night before school started -- so I watched Friends With Money, which was well-acted, particularly by Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand (and I am never sorry to see Jason Isaacs or Simon McBurney, though the men's roles were pretty thankless) but rather depressing given its theme of upper-middle-class white mid-life angst. Conclusions: it is better to be rich than not to be rich, though being filthy rich brings its own angst, and sleeping with married men is a bad idea, though the only alternative may be a sexless marriage...um, thanks?
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