I intended to finish the first draft of my new short story this morning but instead I ended up rewriting the thousand words I already have down. Something I watched last night inspired me to flesh out certain details in a different way. Also, I had been groping my way around the story when I wrote those three or four pages and now that I understand the story better, they needed work.
If you looked at the five-day forecast graphic posted on Yahoo each day, you’d think we were in the middle of a rainy season. Every icon shows rain. However, the fine print says 20-30% chance most days. A little like the roulette wheel. We’ve only had rain out here in the suburbs one time in the past week, though there was a good storm downtown a couple of days ago. Still reaching the high nineties every day, with heat indices well over a hundred. One of the local electric power companies is advising people to ease back on power consumption between 3 and 7 p.m. today to keep from overloading the grid. Otherwise we might be heading toward in a rolling blackout situation (worst case scenario).
I was going to watch my recording of Covert Affairs last night but there was some sort of glitch with transmission and I was met with huge chunks of black nothingness. So I guess I’ll have to queue up the DVR to catch it when it airs again.
We’re nearing the end of Six Feet Under. During the week, we normally only watch one episode an evening. My wife and I play a guessing game about how the corpse of the week is going to die. The (first) episode we watched last night she got right. It was the one with the woman on rollerblades “walking” three dogs down a steep road. I thought the dogs were going to spot a cat and go every which way with her in tow.
That episode ended with such a dramatic and unexpected event (reminiscent of the way The Closer ended this week) that we decided to watch another. That one started with a guy out for a hike in the hills above L.A. Puffing and panting. My wife guessed heart attack but there was something about the way the camera closed in on him that made me say, out of nowhere, “and then he got eaten up by a tiger.” Three seconds later a mountain lion attacked him. My wife thought I’d watched this already, but I hadn’t—it was totally random. I was so shocked that I burst out laughing when it happened. Couldn’t believe it.
Then the episode took another one of those unexpected turns and we decided to watch a third. That one ended at a place where we felt we could leave the show for another night. We have only two episodes left, including the two-hour finale. The booklet that accompanied the complete series box set spoiled the events of the final season for me to a certain extent, since it gave the birth and death dates of all the major characters. So I knew what was going to happen to one of them. However, I’d been operating under the assumption that it would happen at the end of the last episode. So now I am totally mystified about how the series is going to end—but I’ve heard enough people talk about how incredible the finale is (without giving away any details) that I’m looking forward to it.
