Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Thursday, 26 June 2003

# 5:10 AM

bloody weather

I'm sitting on the roof of my apartment building, writing this entry on my laptop, thanks to the magic of WiFi. It's a beautiful evening. The sun has gone down, but there's enough city glow to see my surroundings. I can't see the keyboard, but (as I was surprised to discover some years ago) I don't need to. It's comfortably cool and breezy.

Now why am I sitting on the roof, you may wonder? Well, because it's bloody hot in the apartment. When I checked the weather forecast this afternoon, they were reporting a current shade temperature of 92°F. (Compare to forecast peak of 80° for the day.) It's cooled down outside but the apartment has yet to catch up — this with all the windows open and the door too, and several of the outer doors to the building blocked open so that air will circulate in the hallway. It'll probably be tolerable in another hour or so.

silly things to do with wet clothes and polythene

Fortunately I managed to get the weekly trip to the laundromat in before it was too hot to be moving around. I skipped the drying phase, figuring that it was hot enough I could just set up the little folding rack I have and save some energy, and maybe get a poor man's swamp cooler effect in the apartment to boot. This plan went off with only one hitch, which was, I had too many wet clothes for the rack. Well, there's a clothesline on the roof ... that is, there used to be a clothesline on the roof. Not anymore.

After a moment of staring in disbelief at the place where it used to be, I started looking around for alternatives. Whereupon my eyes fell on the skylight ... the skylight which, by the way, contributes significantly to the heat burden in the building. It was already obvious at this point that it was going to be too hot today. The skylight is about as big as my bed, and by coincidence I had some sheets in the wash today (these sheets). I've been wishing I could throw a tarp over the skylight for some time ... why not the sheets, and the other clothes? Well, the obvious reason is that the skylight isn't all that clean, and one would like to be able to use the clothes without washing them again afterward. Fortunately, in my mighty Closet of Stuff I Bought Ages Ago for No Good Reason That I Can Remember, there is a roll of polythene house-painter's dropcloth. (I have some vague memory of meaning to re-varnish some chairs...) So I put that over the skylight, and then I put the sheets over the dropcloth, and then I laid out the remaining clothes on the sheets.

This worked quite well as far as getting the clothes dry. I cannot tell whether it made any significant difference to the interior temperature of the building. I am tempted to leave the sheets up there; the weather is predicted to continue too bloody hot for at least another two days, I have more sheets for the bed, and every little bit probably helps.

obligatory harry potter 5 review

Thanks to Sumana for lending me the book. I am pickier than I was, and no longer wish to buy these in hardcover.

I like Order of the Phoenix better than Goblet of Fire, but not quite so much as Prisoner of Azkaban. The main reason for this is that I spent most of the book wanting to smack Harry a good one. This is not bad characterization; he's fifteen years old, people tend to be irritating at that age. Furthermore he is being yanked around by the adults ... not unlike he has been for most of his life, but now he is displaying a tendency not to put up with it anymore.

In several places I felt Ms. Rowling overreached her skills a bit, but that is probably a good sign for her future career; better be a bit too ambitious than never try to stretch oneself. And she seems to have the hang of writing long books a bit better. OotP is slightly longer than GoF, but unlike that one it doesn't read like it would have been better for some ruthless trimming.

I think that's about all I can say without going into spoiler territory.