The new season of Burn Notice has come and gone quickly. Only two more new episodes left this summer. I guess that’s why the lead actor was at loose ends, allegedly driving around under the influence. Other than the rather poor performance by the young actor who played the teenage son in last night’s episode, it was one of the best of the season. I love con-game stories, and that’s what it boiled down to. The final few minutes, when their subject melted down under the weight of his own paranoia and confusion, were terrific.
It didn’t take me as long as I thought it would to get our new credit card information into the hands of the companies that do regular charges. Most of it I was able to do online, and all but one of the others had evening hours so I could call and update the information. Only one left to do today, and that’s taken care of. There’s something about the new credit card number that leads me to think that I’ll never manage to memorize it like I did the old one.
This morning I finished the first draft of the new short story. It came in at 3150 words instead of the expected 2500, but I imagine it’ll lose some of its length upon revision. I’m still not 100% set on the ending–I’m going back and forth between two different ways to bring the story to an end, one more open and the other more ominous. I’m leaning toward ominous.
I finished Laura Lippman’s novel What the Dead Know yesterday. It had a surprise ending that caught me flatfooted. The author did a masterful job of misdirection, leading us to believe certain things as fact and causing us to waver between two possible explanations when there was actually a third, in plain sight. Very well done, and the “real” story was simple, direct, credible and tragic.
Almost every day for the past week there has been a promise of rain, and a couple of times water has actually tumbled out of the heavens, but never as much as it seems like there will be. The sky gets very dark. Thunder rumbles. And then it moves on past us en route to someplace else that is deemed more worthy of rain. The statistics for the region show that the rainfall for July is typical, but not in our area. We’ve had one good soaking rain in the past two months, and nothing but a few sprinkles here and there otherwise. I thought for sure the Coldplay concert was going to get rained out the other night, but there was only some thunder. The concert pavilion is about 4 miles from our house, and when it’s overcast like that, the sound carries much farther than normal, so I was able to hear some of the show. Thought about going at one point, but by the time I did, it was sold out. It almost certainly would have rained if we’d gone.
