What have you done to summertime

I left work early Thursday. This was with their awareness --- well, the secretary's awareness, anyway. The boss hasn't been seen in a few weeks. If I understand the rumors correctly he had a little flap while flying to his out-of-state home because he had ``forgot'' that what he described to the secretary as a letter opener and that the security screeners described as an eight-inch blade was in his carry-on bag. You can see how that happens. I don't take him to be in any lingering trouble, apart from needing a new letter opener.

The reason I was leaving early was that my parents were going to a Broadway play, and they'd invited me to go along with them. They'd also have my aunt from Long Island, and for that matter my aunt and uncle from Connecticut there. (Rhode Island was out originally due to other scheduling issues, but would've had to cancel this week as my aunt there had a fall and while she's fundamentally fine, she's not in shape for the many-hour drives and walking around town implied here.) We haven't gone to a Broadway play in a while --- pretty much since my Long Island aunt had to go through a round of cancer treatment coincident to losing her job, but, she's gotten a clean bill of health and has a new job that's exactly right for the semi-retired lifestyle she wants. And, of course, who knows when we'll have the chance to get together like this again?

When I did leave the office, though, was also when a real Singapore-style cloudburst broke out. Thunder, heavy lightning, and extraordinarily heavy rain fell, the kind which justifies and then overflows monsoon ditches. I joked on Twitter that we got fourteen inches in three minutes, only I wasn't joking. It was heavy enough that not only was the asphalt flooded, but there were rivers formed on top of te water atop the asphalt, with currents atop currents. Just in the time it took me to get from the back door of the office to the car my hoodie --- which I use just as rain protection on these warmer days --- got so soaked that it was still saturated ten hours later.

Trivia: Early versions of the Michigan Algorithmic Decoder programming language would, under many error conditions, print out a crude picture of Alfred E Neuman. Later versions removed this as students were deliberately making errors to get the printout. Source: A History Of Modern Computing, Paul E Ceruzzi.

Currently Reading: The River Where America Began: A Journey Along The James, Bob Deansh.