Air
Monday night I left my landlord a message telling him he'd never see the rest of June's rent if I didn't have an air conditioner in my place by the time I got home from work Tuesday.
I didn't. All I had was a message from him, saying there was no way he could be there Tuesday. He said he'd come put one in Thursday. And he apologised. That was amazing. He usually blusters through without bothering to. Like back when the lights in the halls and stairwells went out and there was no water water for two or three days. He said the power company lost his check.
But sure enough, when I got home from work yesterday, he was in my apartment with a band new air conditioner. Good thing I walked in on hime because he was about to install it in the living room. I didn't want that baby in the living room. I wanted it in the bedroom.
I slept like a dead thing. I made it to work on time, and I was walking around an talking to people, but I didn't wake up until ten o'clock.

Too Bad It Didn't Happen Twenty Years Ago
Unfortunately I was unable to completely escape the ostentatious extravaganza which was Reagan's Thanatropic Haul.
You don't applaude at a funeral. Ever. But I guess that's just an example of the sort of people who liked the man. A woman in the crowd was quoted as saying (according to Dan Rather) "Ronnie and Nancy didn't live in Camelot. They lived in the real world with the rest of us."
What planet are you from, lady? Tens of thousands of people died of AIDS before Reagan or then-VP Bush, Sr., ever publically acknowledged there was a crisis. And their budget cuts crippled fledging research on the disease.
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My brother graduated from college in 1983. He got a BA in art history. He wanted to work in a museum. But hey, guess what. Reagan had just cut all the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, and cultural programs and institutions were left reeling and under-funded.
"One for the Gipper" my ass.

Hilarious
Here's a quote from an article in The New York Review of Books about how in "Troy" (the movie) the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is "cleaned up" by making Patroclus Achilles' "cousin," instead of what he is generally accepted to be in the scholarly world, his lover:
"This film's notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one's collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making."

When Good Vacations Go Bad
Yesterday I was still all in dreamtime mentality from the weekend. I drifted through the day until 3:45, when I had to leave early to go meet the guy who was supposed to install my air conditioner. When the guy came inside he didn't bring said air conditioner. I wondered about that. Then when I showed him where the thing was supposed to go, he said he couldn't install it. The outlets aren't grounded. He said it wasn't sufficient to use one of those three-prong to two-prong adapters - they can start fires. He said I could hire an electrician to change the outlet or I could install it myself.
I came up with a third option which was to send him and the air conditioner back to the store and I went and got my money back. I called the landlord and left a message telling him he'd never see the rest of June's rent if there wasn't an air conditioner in my apartment when I got home from work today.
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That was enough of a bummer - it ended the dreamtime. Today I am rather bummed out in general. The contrast between my day-to-day grind and my stay in the mountains is slapping me in the face. I'm particularly bummed about having to wrangle an air conditioner out of my landlord again. Also my brother's house is being foreclosed. Friday I stopped by to visit my parents and he told me then. He said, "I'm just not making enough money and there's nothing I can do about it." I've told him he needs to leave that area. The economy there is particularly bad. He won't even consider it. My sister said he was a dingbat.
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I threw the new weeknight moderation out the window last night. I watched "American Pie 2." Look, I don't have cable. It was pretty entertaining. Plus, now I have a slight crush on this guy.

Dreamtime
I think that was the first time I'd been back in the mountains in the summer in eleven years. No, I went back for some friends' wedding in 1995, but I stayed in town then.
We camped out in a small tent in a National Park Service campground near Linville Falls. It was not in the gorge proper, which was probably a good thing. The gorge is rough. We got a good site at the edge of a field, under the edge of some trees along a creek. There were other people all around us but we felt isolated and the creek's noise cut down on how much we could hear them.
Saturday morning we took a short hike to see the Falls themselves. We took a slightly challenging trail so we didn't have much company, but an awesome view at the end.
In the afternoon we went to Huntfish Falls. It hadn't changed, it was still awesome. It being a Saturday there were other people there, but it wasn't like Linville Falls. We went up stream a little ways and found a lovely garden-like spot to be by ourselves in.
Note to self: Go back more often.
It was also interesting how we found out Ronald Reagan died. On Saturday we went into the little shop at the Linville Falls Visitors' Center to see if they had a map of the area because I couldn't remember exactly how to get to Huntfish Falls. The attendant was a very nice local woman who was very helpful. I think she was happy to get a question about something a little more involved than "How high are the falls?" A man came in while she was helping us and asked if the falls were really a thousand feet high. She snapped, "No, they're not a thousand feet high. They're ninety feet high." After he left she mumbled something.
But she found a book about North Carolina waterfalls which said take State Road 1518, and she said that was named Old Jonas Ridge Road and it crossed the Parkway about seven miles north. We found it, but it wasn't easy because there was no sign on the Parkway with the road's name on it. The road continued on into Pisgah National Forest and became Forest Road 464.
But Rob left his cap in the shop. By the time we got back to camp Saturday afternoon they had closed. Rob went up there Sunday morning. The same woman was there. While Rob was talking to her some superior called the shop and told the woman to lower the flag to half-mast because Ronald Reagan was dead.