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...I have to be careful, lest I find myself slipping into a stupor.  The heat is partly to blame, of course:  Like everywhere else in the country, we’re having a heat wave, and that’ll kick anything in the head, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s more than just a little hot weather in play here:  I’m in a softly-lit space with captivating music and interesting things to drink, across the street from two buildings with a grape trellis erected between them, grape leaves blowing gently in the breeze.

Fighting sleep at Hour 20 is understandable.  Fighting sleep at Hour 7.5 is Just Plain Sad.

Fortunately, I know the cure. 

Last week, when Lloyd and I were shuttling between work, our apartment and Bunni’s apartment, and I was performing my reclining-on-fainting-couch-and-moaning-about-it routine, the lovely and excellent Margene commented that life before electricity must have been a strenuous row to hoe.  I’ve been thinking about that as I sit here.  I’m making noise about a modem, when there are still places in the world where just finding drinkable water is a full-time job.

This might be a good time to remember that a) I’m a lucky woman, and b) I’m doing it for Heifer.

Five seconds after I posted that last post, the modem went down again.  I waited patiently.  Ten minutes elapsed, then 20, then 25.  “That’s it,” I said to Lloyd.  “I’m going to Freeze Peach,” and packed my laptop.

The instant laptop hit tote bag, the modem flickered back on.

I went to Freeze Peach anyway.  If you click on the webcam link, you can see my knees and laptop at the back of the room.  (Sorry, ‘mouse, that’s all you get to see.)

Well, we’re at 3 p.m. here in beautiful uptown Astoria, which means that Blogathon is 6 hours old.  I should be dancing (yeah!) (oh, come on, you were thinking it, too), but as I emerged from the shower, clad in a clean baseball shirt and smelling of bubblegum soap (Rock Star, for you Lushies in the audience), the modem went down again, and stayed down for five minutes.  It’s back up, and the page loads, while still slow, are still loading, but as I sat monitoring the rapidity of the flickering of the little green modem lights, it struck me:  This is insanity.  The very act of hoping that a page load will work, that a post will not zap itself into the ether, that I won’t disappear from the webring for good, it’s freaking exhausting—and I have to do it for 18 more hours.

Add to this the fact that I had such high hopes for the content.  Bunni has told me that this is the surest route to frustration in the world, that no one expects great content when we’re posting something new once every 30 minutes, and she’s right, but—damn.  I have fixings for bread. I have fixings for ice cream.  I have a bowl of soft peaches in the kitchen, because I was seduced by Edna Lewis’s description of the peach ice cream of her childhood in The Taste of Country Cooking: a bowl of custardy vanilla ice cream, made crunchy by the abundance of vanilla bean specks, covered by ripe peaches crushed between bar hands, and I knew with the certainty of one who has found Jesus, I knew that this is what I wanted to make for Blogathon.  I would make the custard.  I would take pictures of every step.  I would post the pictures.  The very thought of it now seems like an experiment in terror (not based on the movie of the same name, starring Lee Remick).

It’s only 3 p.m. and already it feels like the hour of the wolf.  I don’t want to quit, so I won’t, but I have no earthly idea of how I’m going to get through this.

Leave it to me to come up with a somewhat-thoughtful topic, only to follow it up with a post that says, “Can’t talk!  Showering!” But, well, I had to see how all my ‘thonning buddies were doing before hopping into the shower.  They’re doing brilliantly, of course.  Go see:

Eric

Sam

Skyte

Bunni

Bunni encore

Keith