Nothin' Doin'

Tropical Storm Hannah, as I'm sure you've heard, is bearing down on the east coast, and so it is incredibly rainy and dreary in DC today. It's been raining solidly since about 7:00 last night, which actually works out perfectly because Tim and I decided that we're going to go an entire weekend without spending a single cent.

(BTW: Naming a storm after a current teen sensation makes incredibly difficult to get information about said storm on Google, Thanks National Hurricane Center.)

Of course, this means I can think of nothing I want to do more than go out to a matinee and then to dinner, but the rain is helping. And to deter myself even further, I've put the lemon tree in the shower and sprayed it with bug spray that has to dry before I can move it, so we couldn't take showers and go out into the world if we wanted to. (A note on the lemon tree: It FINALLY has a lemon, which is about the size of a penny right now, BUT in addition the brown scale bugs it has--don't worry they only like citrus and tomato plants and don't spread to people or other plants--it's got some sort of weird almost microscopic spiders that may have come in on this stupid bamboo-type thing I bought. DAMNIT.)

Really though, I like wandering around on rainy days like this. There's something kind of nice about how everything looks different when it's rainy and the sky is gray. I also like wind, and although I love summer I'm looking forward to sweater weather. Also, I'm sure there will be plenty of elbow room at the museums today. Elbow room is remarkably important. Now, when I think of the Rosetta Stone, my first thought isn't of the key that unlocked the Egyptian language and opened up one of the richest and most important cultures to ever exist, but of the terrible woman in the British Museum who stood directly in front of the case talking about some television show and blocking the view of literally 45 people who wanted to catch a glimpse. Classy. Thanks a lot awesome American Tourist Lady.

Anyway, apparently, there's a new ocean exhibit at the Natural History Museum--although I'm not sure if it's open now.

Mostly, I think the plan is to stay in and finish our current books. I lent "A Confederacy of Dunces" to Tim over a month ago and while I'm really happy that he'd finally reading it, I'm officially never, ever, EVER, lending a book to anyone ever again. So don't even ask. It look like it got run over by a thresher. I know there's that philosophical argument that book-manglers make that if a book doesn't look like crap when you're done with it, then you haven't appreciated it. Bullocks. That was the kind of philosophy that might have been ok when I was I was 12 and my parent bought all my books for me, but now, thank you very much, I have to buy them all with my own money, so I'd rather not have them falling apart at their literal seams. (Ahhhh, now that was a cheesy book pun.)

Anyhoo, I'm reading "Falling Man" by Don DeLillo, which, like everything by Don DeLillo, is briefly engrossing, and then confounds me, and then loses my interest completely, and then engrosses me again, over and over, in waves. I don't know if I can finish it today but I hope to, because I'd rather be reading Harry Potter.