Relentless

All night, the clouds held in the heat, allowing a few stars to shine through here and there, and drifting across the moon. The house has barely cooled. The sultry air is abuzz with insects. My right ear burns and itches from the bite of a mosquito. The clouds are thinning a bit, now, exposing the land for the sun which will rise in a while to bring another enervating day. The air is perfectly still. There will be no morning breeze, I think.

Sultry

Our displaced tropical weather continues to be something out of a Somerset Maugham story. I might as well be in Singapore. At least then I could put on one of those white suits and go to Raffles and drink G&T under a slowly turning ceiling fan, and maybe get involved in some sort of international intrigue, passing clandestine letters to the Governor General's Tahitian mistress in a curtained booth of a seedy waterfront bar, while the sinister First Mate of a tramp steamer eavesdropped on our hushed conversation, but was knocked unconscious by the piano player (who turns out to be a government agent) and shanghaied onto a Chinese junk bound for Java before he could report his findings to the German ambassador. Something like that. It would make the heat just a little bit easier to endure.

On the birght side, at least we're unlikely to have a typhoon in the Sierra Nevada. Just the occasional earthquake, or raging forest fire. Oh, summer be over!