Every few (or several) months, I update the online version of my Cemetery Dance column News from the Dead Zone. The latest post went live on Friday, with a summary of everything coming in September, in the final months of 2019, and beyond. There’s a lot! I’ll have a review of The Institute up during the first week of September.
The same week, I’ll review It Chapter Two. I just arranged to attend a press screening a couple of days before it premieres. The last time I went to one of those, for Chapter One, was in the days after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The west side of the city, where the screening was held, was like a ghost town, with military-style helicopters flying overhead. It was quite surreal. Almost post-apocalyptic.
I’ll also have something cool to do with Doctor Sleep, but I’ll hold off on announcing that until closer to the date.
This weekend, I’m going to KillerCon in Austin, my second year attending this intimate convention. It’s close enough to drive to, so that’s a big plus. It’s not exactly my genre (the focus is on extreme horror), but I know many of the people attending. Maybe I’ll try my hand at the Creative Fiction Contest, where we have to write a 200-word or less story using five keywords.
We’re in the midst of a heatwave, with daily temperatures flirting with or exceeding 100° and “feels-like” temps upwards of 110°. Like Friday at Necon, in other words.
When we got back from our mile-long round-the-block walk on Saturday evening, I thought the house seemed a little warmer than usual. We typically keep it at 77° during the day, when one or more of us is upstairs working, and 78° during the evenings when we’re both downstairs. The display showed 81°–even though the set point was correct.
I went back outside and checked the compressor unit. It was running. Checked the circuit breakers: ditto. Went back to the A/C unit and noticed snowballs accumulating on the hose into the house. That’s not right, I though.
When I went back inside, I realized no air was coming out of the vents. The poor A/C was working up a storm outside, but the blower motor in our attic had gone kaput, so there was no distribution. This was after 8pm on Saturday, so we decided to wait to call for service. I put in a call yesterday morning, requesting someone for today, figuring we could suffer through one hot day rather than make someone come out on Sunday.
By late afternoon, it was 85° in the house. Now, that’s only 7-8° hotter than normal, but we were sweltering. When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for supper, I said, “Go somewhere that has air conditioning!” Of course, the place we chose had it cranked up so high that we were chilly.
So, we got through a day and a half with only ceiling fans to stir the warm air. Oddly, it felt like the time during Hurricane Ike when we were five days without electricity, although that was in early September and not in the midst of a heat wave, so we didn’t suffer as much.
We’re now back up and running and in a while the A/C, which has had a two-day break, will get us back down to normal temperatures and all will be right with our world.
We watched Tolkien on Friday night, the biopic of the author of The Lord of the Rings. It dealt primarily with his experiences as a young boy, orphaned after his mother died of diabetes (his father died in South Africa before they moved to England). His care and education was left to a catholic priest. Tolkien managed to scrape up enough scholarships to get into Oxford and served on the continent during WWI before being invalided out. The movie ends at the point where he has decided to start writing The Hobbit, which I found disappointing because that was where things got really interesting from my point of view. Maybe they’ll do a sequel!
