- New Thing Learned for 21 August: 27% of Americans don't read any books at all, and those who do read an average of seven a year. Slackers! SLACKERS!!! [Source: a news anchor who seemed way too impressed by somebody who only read 70 books last year...]
- New Thing Learned for 22 August: Electricity, maybe, but the soles of Converse All-Stars are just barely up to the challenge of asphalt that's been basking on a 97-degree day, and I won't be cutting across that parking lot again during the summer. If you can feel the heat through the soles of your shoes, you probably ought to have given in and taken the bus... [Source: a hot parking lot.]
- New Thing Learned for 23 August: An "all-out" is when a block's worth of streetlights has lost power at once due to an electrical failure. [Source: Chicago Department of Emergency Management press conference.]
- New Thing Learned for 24 August: Just in case you thought there simply couldn't be any two food-related words that went together less plausibly than escargot pizza, we now find that food-(mad-)scientists have devised Bacon Chocolate. Yeeeeaah, good luck with that. [Source: Rollick.]
There were some scary moments, when spray was blowing in under the overhang as far as our back door, but thanks to a neighbor's beach umbrella our unit remains as dry as a fresh pair of Huggies, although this storm was still fierce enough to wake up our sump-pump with the runoff. The Killer Beans managed to snap off three of the sunflowers during the windier first installment of the rains, and I went out during the lull to tidy up; we now have a nice vase of sunflowers in the kitchen, and I managed to disentangle the offending beans from the dead stalks and draped them along the top of the fence, from where they've probably blown off into the yard next door in the second wave. And the garlic-and-pee squirrel repellent is much diluted from all this soaking, but at least we won't have to worry about vampires for a while, either. So, It Could Have Been Much Worse, but still nervous about forecasts that say more rain's heading into our already saturated sewer systems...