Good weather wishes for you, sara.

I think your parents are utterly charming too, fwiw.

Oh man. I did NOT sleep well and neither did Noah. We set up the tent to do our periodic camp-in-the-backyard bit. He was wound up (4+ hour nap + sips of an iced coffee + visible moon = toddler too excited for words) and wouldn't lie down. Finally he said he wanted to go in the house, so we did and I put him in the crib to howling. He didn't want to not be with us. Ugh. It took to long to get him settled.

I never even heard of a swamp cooler until I went to Tucson! They are so ingenious, and much better for the environment/your electricity bills than AC. A pity they don't work where I live.

Also never encountered until I went to the desert: outdoor patios 'cooled' by sprinklers set up just high enough above the tables and chairs that the water droplets evaporate on the way down, and all that is left is the cooled air.

Goddamned rain.

Working for the power company, I had a couple of conversations with people from the Southwest who moved to Georgia and went on at length about how we wasted so much money here on air conditioning when we could use swamp coolers. I just wanted to pat them on their dense little heads and say, "We don't have evaporation here, honey."

Oh, yes, flea, I know all about the CHEW problem--I had a raised-from-a-bun rabbit for five years and two adult rescues for another three, and the combined list of electronics ruined by the three of them despite proofing is a little horrifying. Our place will be severely rabbit-proofed before any new rabbit comes in.

I'm sorry for the rough night, Kat. Matilda's been in a similar wound-up-at-night, don't-make-me-sleep-alone cycle, and it's exhausting for everyone.

The problem with evaporative in the southwest is water is getting to be a premium. I don't know how much longer they can sustain. The drought is persisting.

I love my swamp cooler. I'm pretty sure it uses less water than, say, watering the lawn (which I don't do). I don't have to run it constantly, either. But, when I do need it, ahhhhhh.

Oh, you guys. How I've missed you. And how I wished to write here again in better circumstances.

Yesterday was my birthday (or, as I like to call it, the beginning of my birthday. This is one of the cases on which I follow both Jewish and Georgian calendar, and to me, my birthday stretches from one date to the other, in addition to the actual celebrations that will have to postpone due to evil tests). I went out to a show marathon organized by one of my best friends. I had absolutely wonderful time.

Two and a half hours into this someone I know got a text message about a shooting about a mile or two away from where we were. Nobody knew where it was. We all assumed it was a "usual" terror attack or some psycho, and in those cases? You continue doing whatever you were doing. "As you were". Even when the second text message came, 30 minutes later, we didn't know the grounds for this shooting. All it said that the killer is still out there, somewhere. I have to say it didn't really bother me. It was just weird. I thought for a minute to go and tell my friend who organized this about the attack, but since I figured that worst case, it's "just" a terror attack, there's no reason to stop the party and announce this. If someone close you know was there, you'll know it within one to two hours. That's how it works.

I knew before that my birthday is also the banishment day for illegal foreign/immigrant workers, with some lack of clarity regarding how much of them are refugees from Darfur, and a holiday to the freaking trafficking scums how get rich from this spinning door policy. But until this country will take legal methods against those murderers and human lives pimps, there's not much that can be done.

It's also offending me, personally. I happen to be a straight person who is having a long time crush on queer critical theory. I keep thinking that I could be at that place too, because I don't feel that standing up for others or hanging out in "LGBT places" has anything to do with my sexuality. I don't assume that everyone in that place (I'm calling it place because "club" isn't the right word to describe it, I think - it's a small meeting place, but it is, technically, a club) were in fact in the LGBT spectrum, but now people will automatically think so.

(Edit: and indeed, according to a local news site, one of the murdered was straight as well).

Now I feel like I don't do enough. I know that I don't do enough (though my own parents are pretty much confused by now regarding to my statements - I'm trying to make my father, mostly, understand that what he says sometimes sounds like blunt-out homophobia. But this is almost all that I can do, for now, and it's so frustrating.

I have no idea how getting outside of the closet feels like. But I know how fear feels like, and this is it.

For now, peole are still trying to understand what happened. Nobody knows who did it yet, and I'm not sure I want my fears regarding who could might have done it to come true. I still hope it's some twisted, sick person who happened to fall on this club, and not with ideological background.

Shir, that's heartbreaking.

Shir, I'm so sorry that that's something that happened on your birthday and so close to you and most of all, that it's just such a heartbreaking, horrible thing to have happened at all.