After a few days baking in the high 90s, we headed for what promised to be a least 10 degrees less with fog coming in.

We had forgotten that most establishments in SF are ill-prepared for hot weather, and stale air from the previous days lingered, especially in stores with skylights. Back in the oven of a car, cold sodas in hand, we decided to see if it was easier to park near Paxton Gate on a weekday.

It certainly was, but a sudden braking meant I dumped half the contents of my Diet Pepsi in my lap. It felt great, but I looked like I had massive bladder failure. Luckily, I had brought a change of clothes.

Can you change pants in a car in the Mission?

Many thanks to the staffperson who led me into the nether regions of Paxton Gate where I was able to put on dry clothes.

Here in the Bay Area at least:

1. The fan on the floor has ceased to be an effective piece of equipment.
2. I am sticking to the work chair.
3. The mailman manages to deliver the mail before noon.
4. The laptop is hot enough to the touch that the software to help control the fan must be checked often.

I’m out of here.

You’ve never seen lightning in quite this way. Thanks to Chris for pointing this out.

Tunafish salad with tomatoes from the garden. It was hot.

This review sums the movie up well, especially the line about the ‘zombie with hair’. Cranked up high, perfect for a summer night.

Well, almost. A family member is outfitting his apartment, and we were returning to the point of origin after trekking through the entire store. I had spent the morning shopping in SF, underfueled. IKEA in Palo Alto was packed with a Sunday afternoon crowd - the phrase that comes to mind is ‘teeming masses’. Back to school time. Shoppers were sprawled on various pieces of furniture, some in a stupor much like mine. The air at IKEA could use some freshening.

A man holding a small boy lay across one end of a large sofa. Both were sound asleep. I sank into the other end, leaned my head back, and would have been unconscious except the family member kept walking back and forth in front of me. It appeared he would make a purchase at last.

Termites in the ceiling have gained the upper hand, so to speak. But today is not such a great day for them, now that the microwaving machine has been turned on, and will remain on for over an hour. Thankfully, it is only a smallish area. The machine has a high-pitched sound that is very annoying. Perhaps the termites will find it even more so.

So there I was, unwrapping year-old Christmas candy for some photos, pondering the difficulties of salvaging the big, expensive candy canes that partially melted into one sticky mess. My Mac had fallen asleep after many hours of PhotoShopping, and I hit the spacebar to wake it up.

And got the screen you see. It took a bit of talking to, and a restart. All is well. It has been a long day. And yes, I lost at least three hours of work.

Once in a while, I blunder into an interesting sale of collectibles. It really doesn’t matter what kind of items they are, if they can be useful as photo props, I’m in. Over the weekend, I went to see the goods of a most incredible collector, heavy on the weaponry.

The antique pistols were fascinating, if a bit pricey. As someone pointed out, most were replicas, but it was fun to heft a firearm so compact, yet so weighty. Toward the back, there was a table full of battle axes and morning stars. These I left for another day (when the prices were marked down), and went into a small room packed with Buddhas and assorted deities, demons and china of the sort I’ve been looking for.

When I returned on Sunday, a surprising amount of stuff was still available, including the medieval armory. I could use one of the morning stars, but hesitated at the axes. The seller gave me a deal if I got one of each.

Leftover spaghetti. I left the room after what might be the cheesiest volcano eruption effects ever.

What the multi-gold medalist eats on his Olympic days. If you try to follow this diet, you will gain about three pounds a day.

I saw it lurch by the window, and ran out with my camera. It’s not the most graceful of insects, and indeed its wings are a vivid blue/green. Loud too. It headed for a tomato bed. I got one shot off, but missed it. It looks like a shield bug, but unlike ones I can find online. After sloppily landing in a few other places near the ground, it disappeared once again.

It appears to be over an inch long, possibly an inch and a half.

At last, the exterminator arrived. We’ve had the microwaving done before, but at my request, they didn’t inject the beams with as much toxic stuff as they wanted. So now the termites are back. Small wood-colored bits fell onto an area usually reserved for my indoor photography, and we left it so the exterminators could see.

With temps in the upper range lately, there’s been swarming in many homes, he reported. Obviously, we had a problem, plus he found a few more areas of lesser infestation. This was pretty good news, we were concerned we’d have to tent the place. He kept scooping up the round bits and exclaiming at the quantity.

Exterminator: Gee, this is quite a lot of termite poop.
Me: It’s poop? I thought it was my chewed up house.
E: Well, yes and no. This is how they tell you they’re active. You’re lucky not to have an attic where it wouldn’t be so easy to tell where they are.
Me: Will you be doing the whole ceiling in here?
E: No. Just this area, but we’ll have to put in more of the poison. Did you know termite poop has a smell? (grins)
Me: Uh, no. I never really thought about it.
E: I know the smell real well.
Me: What’s it smell like?
E: Here, take a whiff.
Me (not moving) Uh, I have stopped up sinuses.
E: It’s not so bad.
Me: Stinky?
E: No, no. It’s not. (has some in his hand) Here. Smell.
Me: (seeing the stuff going up my nostrils in my mind’s horrified eye) That’s okay. Just tell me what it smells like.
E: (laughs) Actually, it smells like processed wood.
Me: That’s understandable.

In the parade of happy service people we’ve had through here, he had to rank up there in the top five most cheery. Maybe it’s from all that deep inhalation of a fine brown substance.

The photo is, of course, low-res. If you need a high quality image, please let me know. Few termites are cooperative enough to dump out their poop right onto a white photo table.

Our last dog was a golden retriever. I’m thinking about getting another big dog, and pondering the reasons they have such short lives. A little research shows that gastric torsion and bloat are fairly common. I did quite a bit of reading.

After lunch one day last week, I felt a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. What did I eat? Homemade vegetable soup, full of carrots, tomatoes, corn, cabbage - all high fiber material. But then I eat this stuff all the time without problems. This time I did add a parsnip, something a family member bought out of curiosity. Was that what was stabbing me?

The previous night I had shrimp salad. Both days I had an ice cream sandwich, the little ones that are referred to as ‘chocolate-flavored cardboard around some ice cream’. Actually, I’d been eating ice cream almost every day lately, these sandwiches were less than 200 calories each.

Did I have torsion? Nah. It didn’t feel like my stomach was rotated. The pain was lower, and very sharp. I felt cold. I went to bed real early.

It wasn’t any better the next day. I read up on intestinal woes. I called a friend who had knowledge of Crohn’s disease and diverticulitis. I learned what irritable bowel syndrome is. She failed to shed light on my problem. By now it was the weekend. If it’s not better by Monday, I thought, I’ll have to see a doctor. I don’t like GI testing.

By now, the pain was beginning to have a familiar feeling. It was less sharp, but still bothersome. It reminded me of the time I had a stomachache for months. The doctor could find nothing wrong after doing a lot of really uncomfortable tests. During this time, I wanted to eat soothing things like oatmeal with milk. Cream soups. Mashed potatoes. What made the pain go away? One day I snapped to and stopped all dairy. The doctor had not said a word about lactose intolerance.

So. This time, it only took three days. The pain is gone.

Dinner was not memorable. The rice noodles were a different brand than what I usually get, and did not survive stir-frying. They became a gelatinous mass in the wok. Luckily, there was a shrimp/potato salad from last week, roast pork and lots of Tuscan cantaloupe.

When I spotted the movie at the library last week, I thought, hmmm. Antonio Banderas dancing. Who cares how the rest of the movie is.

As it turned out, very entertaining, much more than I bargained for. As in Remember the Titans and similar films, it’s the transformation from rough to sublime that is so fascinating. Now I have to find the soundtrack.

Work was unspeakably dull this morning, and in an attempt to wake up, I went out to water the tomato plants around noon. I heard a bumblebee.

Next thing I knew, it was buzzing around my head so I had to duck. It didn’t look like the usual yellow and black bees that show up in the yard. This was much bigger, and the snapshot my brain got was iridescent, as in blue and greens. It disappeared into the tomatoes.

Was it a tomato hawkmoth?

Don’t think so, hawkmoths tend to be nocturnal. Perhaps a hummingbird hawkmoth?

It’s not bluish-green.

My tomatoes are doing well this year, unlike the last 15. The last thing they need is an influx of hornworms.

The insect went over the fence, but maybe I’ll be taking a noon walk around the garden for the next few days. I’ll try to get a photo.

The clouds tonight were very different, some in the west looked almost like mammatus. After we got out of the library, a huge rainbow dominated the sky, possibly the most vivid I’d ever seen. Everyone else dug out their camera phones too, but they probably were used to taking pictures with theirs. When we left the parking lot, people were still standing around, mesmerized by the golden pink light, and the enormous rainbow that stood out in the darker part of the sky.

Due to my inexperience with the camera phone, I have no pictures of this amazing evening. But many others did.

It sprinkled on the way home, but this being August, it didn’t last long.

Years ago, a friend and I decided that your hair knows when you’re coming down with something. A really bad hair day just might mean there’s a bug in the system.

Thanks to Olympic pressures, a discovery has been made to detect infection early in athletes. The test, which involves the assistance of a luminescent mollusk, known as the piddock, will help coaches decide when to isolate a team member or to cut short the hard training sessions of a soon-to-be-ill competitor.

But I bet their hair looks like crap too.