A couple of hours ago, four women
and two men gathered around the
curb at the corner of Argyle and
Rokeby to watch this molting
cicada (click on the picture
for a good image).

It vibrated back and forth
and around and around while
shedding its shell. We
watched its legs come out
and tap at the curb.

We watched its enormous
eyes watch us. While we
watched, we talked about
real estate.

After lunch with her
sister (Morrissey fanatic;
molting cicada photographer),
UD returned to
the curb. The cicada was gone.

… over her face at her
birthday dinner this evening.

La Kid with Matthew Broderick, yesterday.

Both sport glasses so uncool they’re cool.

Some little twerp playing tournament Scrabble had been winning big this year until competitors realized he was stealing blanks, hiding them on his person, and then hauling them out when he needed them.

This story allows UD to share the fact that she has joined an online Scrabble site (it’s mainly Brits) and she’s learning a lot. All she’s done in her life, Scrabblewise, is play a sort of slow game on a board. Her opponents have been a motley crew, and whenever she’s suggested to any of them an hourglass sand timer (three minutes) or other such constraint, she’s been shouted down.

Well! Turns out there’s

Normal (5 minutes per move)

Quick (3 minutes)

Stress (2)

and

Rush (1).

Strongly attracted to the word Normal, and not wanting to make herself a nervous wreck, UD has been sticking to the five-minute thing; but her excellent scores and rating, which are public on the site, have attracted the fast-lane people. They shoot her messages when she logs on:

MARGARET: PLAY A GAME?

Naively, she accepted the first of these invitations. She assumed the player was Normal. The player was Rush. UD stayed in the game because it seemed the decent thing to do, and she even made a good score (though she lost), but she didn’t have any fun, and she didn’t make any interesting words or letter connections. Rushed games turn into Three-Letter Smackdown.

Her Rushed opponent told her (you can chat while playing) that rushed games are in part about keeping people from cheating, and I guess it’s true that if you have five minutes to fart around on your computer while playing, you can check whether something’s a two-letter word, etc. But in most of my Normal games, both of us play quite fast anyway. It’s rare that anyone uses more than three minutes, and typical for people to use around two.

… La Kid and her friend Julia
visited with a couple of cast
members after seeing
The Best Man.

… Frontiers of Democracy conference last month at Tufts University. (Scroll down to Opening Plenary.)

The conference concludes this year’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a co-creation of Peter Levine and Mr UD.

Congress has gone. August is day after day of dead air and wet heat. There’s a tornado warning for a neighboring county until midnight.

All the UDs are vaguely under the weather. A few hours ago we sat in the living room wondering what to eat for dinner and we got nowhere with that. We looked out the sliding glass doors at Lady Gaga the Deer Mother. Lady Gaga the Deer Mother shows up every afternoon with her nursing fawn and while the fawn nurses she STARES into the living room just like this like Fuck you try to stop me. She has the pointless belligerent exhibitionism of Lady Gaga and that’s where she got her name.

She’s in the same bad mood everybody’s in around here. She’s even mean to her kid. When she gets tired of challenging us she storms off, the kid clinging and dragging up the hill.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and guys from West Virginia who want to take down our trees knock at the door. When the phone rings, it’s a recording of the governor saying something about our proud state.

La Kid withdraws to her room and her brand new MacBook Air whose thin silvery je ne sais quoi makes her parents feel resentful, dowdy. Her room is full of gadgets that make us feel dowdy and resentful. Every now and then she looks away from her MacBook to chat, on her iPhone, with her friend Mark, who’s teaching English in Taiwan.

La Kid returns to Ireland at the end
of the summer, to study drama.

NOW we’re getting serious. Now the big shit shows up. Now Jim Stanley Asphalt pulls a red dump truck up to UD‘s curb. Hitched to the truck is a flatbed (?) truck on which stand…

WHAT? WHAT? I don’t know what these machines are called. Earth mover? Yellow sit-on thing that smooths things out? Is UD going to go outside and ask these guys to NAME their vehicles?

Les UDs figured that since last week’s machines – the ones that powered over our already in bad shape driveway to remove our downed trees – reduced our driveway to rubble, this would be a good time to get the driveway resurfaced. One guy digs at the rubble a bit while another guy maneuvers into place the small yellow scoopy thing. Now two guys are shoveling soil and rubble into the scoop while the scoop thing reverses down the driveway. The guy driving the scoop is wearing a yellow, well-ironed, pristine, polo shirt (this is greater Bethesda).

So lots more shoveling into scoops going on, plus one guy, sitting on my front lawn, has a bunch of long yellow poles and is trying to open a roundish container of some sort…. Oh, it has a pump handle and the guy is pumping it while standing in my driveway…

Okay, here’s EXACTLY what they’re going to do. I’m taking this from the contract.

Paving driveway of 405 square feet with asphalt. Mill asphalt down at street to meet back flush. Edge grass back and apply a tack coating so two layers bond as one. Machine lay 2″ of topping asphalt and power roll with a 3-5 ton asphalt roller. Bank all edges on a 45 degree angle. Clean up jobsite before leaving.

*************************

The dump truck has, you know, leaned its back thing down and the scoop thing is now receiving asphalt into itself from the back thing … Hey, it’s smokin’ out there! … Or I guess it’s not asphalt yet. Tar? Okay so the long poles are rakes and the guys are smoothing the tar with them.

Plus they’re using the back of a shovel.

They’re talking in Spanish and laughing loudly. HEY YOU LAUGHIN’ AT ME? YOU LAUGHIN’ AT ME MAN? I think they’re laughing at my driveway.

Smokin’ again. Guy in sit-on smooth-thing goes back to dump truck, opens back of dump truck, and more black stuff – tar, no? – comes pouring out.

Watching these guys, I’d say it looks as though they’re putting dark chocolate icing on a cake.

******************************

Now the yellow smoother thing is rolling over the rich chocolaty tar and making it look lighter — more like a driveway. Long streaks of steamy liquid are coming off the roller.

The green of my liriope looks elegant against the new dark surface.

*******************************

Now the guy in the polo shirt is approaching my front door. He rings the bell! He asks for a check. UD takes out her checkbook and writes him a check. He smiles and thanks her for the work and drives all his machines away.

The chipper!

I’ve just heard the sound of a chipper!

And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.

UD awakes to the sound of the guys finally getting to work on her downed trees.

Ah. And there’s the sound of a big-ass saw.

*******************************

What it’s like here right now.

(Warning: Not Safe for Work.)

‘Don’t be concerned about the smoke, folks. We braked hard for awhile back there and kicked up some dust. Everything’s fine.’

‘This is Clarence at the Cafe Car. The Cafe Car is not now at this time currently open because of technical difficulties. Once the technical difficulties are resolved I will make an announcement that the Cafe Car is open. The Cafe Car is now currently not open. Thank you.’

‘Provincetown is next. A reminder that if you’re in the Quiet Car you must be very very very quiet. We don’t want any drama in the Quiet Car today.’

******************************************

UD‘s on an Acela train back to Garrett Park, Maryland, Land of Downed Trees.

… can now be yours for just under a million dollars.

A dear deer, because it’s so hot outside, and I pity it in the heat.

This deer, lying a few feet from my bedroom window, watches me through the grapes and hollies. Its black eyes watch me lying in my cool bed, laptop on my belly.

Things have swung back to some normality. We now have both power and the internet. Every day, for as long as I can bear it, I move my lopper through branch after branch of downed walnut, slipping over yellow fruit as I go. I hatchet through thicker limbs.

So far I’ve regained the side path to my backyard — my backyard, where the walnut was split clean in the middle by a massive tulip poplar that fell on it. The woodpeckers can’t believe their luck.

Now that my lopping has revealed convoluted tree bones, my neighbors tell me what I’ve got is artistic, eco-art. I contemplate saving the money it will cost us to have big stuff removed… Just give the pile a title and let it be… Soltan 2012… No… Sultan 2012. Donald Sultan is a famous artist… I think over the Buddhist metaphysics I was reading last night… Change, the insubstantiality, immateriality, of all seemingly stable things. No shit.

I’m not sure I’m understanding all of this background on the derecho, but I think it explains why our friends the Elkins, who during the storm pulled their car over to the side of the road (they had just left our house after an evening of dim sum), tell us that “the car seemed pretty close to levitating.”

Les UDs remain at UD’s sister’s house (she’s the Morrissey fanatic, and the producer of my Udemy lectures) in upper Montgomery County, where ceiling fans and refrigerators still hum.

… took this photo of
UD‘s backyard after
the massive storms
last night.

Click on the image!
Much better view.

*********************************

We’d just said goodnight to our friends the Elkins (we were arguing about whether voting is irrational and best avoided), and just as they drove away the night sky exploded with wind and lightning. You know that Les UDs live in a small house surrounded by big trees.

As we put away glasses and plates, the wind built to an impossible intensity, and we could hear trees crashing close up. Time to go to the basement.

The lights in the house flickered and everything went black.

Mr UD opened two folding chairs and we sat in the dark (punch line of a Jewish joke), watching the non-stop lightning illuminate our little ground-level windows, and hearing the wind rage and rage and rage. This was something I’d never experienced in Garrett Park.

********************************

We’re simply ridiculously lucky that nothing hit our house. The trees even left our lawn furniture alone. Limbs fell just short of the house, just short of the deck.

UD spent this morning cleaning debris from her front yard – lots had fallen there, but nothing she couldn’t move. She had to stop every few minutes to talk to neighbors, who gathered in growing crowds to chat about the damage in town. A scientist here who worked in UD’s father’s lab has apparently lost his house – a tree broke it in half.