temperate glory

The temperature has finally dropped to 70F for the first time since - let's see, I've been keeping a spreadsheet of the weather forecasts so I can be prepared for heat waves - since the end of April. Over 5 months. Maybe I can finally put away the fixings for chicken salad, which is my go-to dinner recipe on nights when it's too hot to cook, and bring back out the lentil soup which is a mainstay for winter.

Fortunately this summer the heat never got quite so continuously over 100F that I was forced to retreat to an air-conditioned hotel room as I was last year. Plus B's vigilance in running fans in open windows in the evening to cool the house down has been balm to our bodies even as it aggravates the electric bills. Fortunately we can afford to suffer through the latter.

In other news, one of the many great things about not being on FB is that I didn't even learn about the Great Outage of Monday until it was over. But now, thanks to the whistleblower, we're in for another orgy - for this has happened before - of social therapy for FB, where everybody goes around the circle and tells it what's wrong with it. And Z. issues heated denials that his company would ever do what the documents have just proved that it does do all the time.

In today's column, Leonard Pitts chides FB by pointing out that getting people to talk to one another doesn't necessarily bring them together, and he cites an interview his newspaper did 22 years ago with a historian pointing out the long history of the erroneous assumption that it does. But in fact knowledge that it's an error dates back in pop culture rather longer than 22 years:

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Mary Kay Kare

This is Mary Kay in happier times, about ten years ago I think. I'd like to remember that, because life was not always good to Mary Kay, most grievously to her when her beloved husband Jordin died unexpectedly after heart surgery four years ago. Since that time she had felt utterly bereft and was often incommunicato, to the distress and frustration of her friends, which is essentially why it wasn't realized immediately that she had died very recently of a blood infection. The news was passed on through a couple of hands and I don't know any more than that.

Mary Kay was from Oklahoma, and though she remained in touch with her family, she tended to describe home and family alike as something she was glad to escape from. A career as a catalog librarian was part of that escape; she worked for several years in quality control for OCLC (known to the general public as the proprietors of WorldCat) in Ohio. But as with a lot of us in that field, her career stalled when posts ran out and she fell out of the current swim. I was able to get her an interview for an open post once at a library where I was working, but it didn't get any further than that.

It was fandom which really caused Mary Kay to blossom. She was a conrunner, she was a smof, she was a Hugo administrator, she was an apahack, she was a filker, she was active in our local Mythopoeic Society discussion group, she was like many fans a loving cat-owner. She met Jordin at a Worldcon, and they were a devoted couple ever after. The only catch was that Jordin's work required him to spend a lot of time in Seattle, and Mary Kay was very sensitive to weather and could not handle the overcast climate. They tried a number of solutions - part-time here, part-time there; living separated part of the time; before finally being able to settle in San Jose several years back.

Mary Kay at her best was intelligent and invigorating and a great person for conversations about books and cats. I wish we could have done more to alleviate the depression and the self-deprecation that loomed over her so much, darkening even the earlier years and getting worse over time. But she could be hard to reach, both in terms of establishing conversation and in pursuing the conversation you're having. I'm sorry things didn't work out better for her.