Two Thursday thoughts:

1. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced an extended period of extremely hot weather, with attendant drought and high pressure, fully grasps the sort of misery that this weather pattern causes in certain people.

I was very disappointed the other day when we got a few drops of rain, and I missed even seeing it, because I was in a windowless room helping a student analyze data. It made me think of the Ray Bradbury story "All Summer in a Day,", which I actually know best from the Wonderworks episode (where the story was slightly rewritten to show the children atoning a bit for their cruelty to Margot).

They've asked people in the west and northwest areas of town to voluntarily limit watering so that they will be sure to have enough water in case of a bad brush or grass fire. I'm expecting those limitations to expand and become more serious if we don't get some rain soon. (I don't really water my lawn - though I did before July 4, just as a precaution - but I do water the plants in the garden, but of late, I've been doing it by standing there with the hose and very directedly watering particular plants, rather than just putting the sprinkler on them. I think that kind of watering-from-the-hose is still OK, as it tends to use less water)

They said on the news this morning that the Grayson County (the North Texas county closest to me) firefighters have been having lots of small grass fires to deal with. That county is not under a burn ban, but they're considering it. However, I'm not sure how much that would help, because it seems that most of the fires they talked about were along the 69/75 corridor (the main highway; it's the one I take to go to Sherman and to go to McKinney). So it sounds like people are being careless and throwing lit cigarette butts out of their cars. (I realize I'm looking at this from the perspective of a life-long non-smoker, but I can't quite understand what leads to someone thinking, "This thing is smoldering, I'll just throw it out of my car where it might land in grass where there's been no appreciable rain for two months")

So the weather is really starting to get me down. I don't know if it's the higher humidity right now or the high pressure (we were at about 30 inches of mercury yesterday) but I hurt all over, especially my sinuses.

2. The other day I was uploading (downloading? not sure what you call it for the transfer from a CD-ROM to the hard drive) coverages from one of the research sites so my student could use it in GIS analysis. Because of one of the little quirks of the filetypes/Windows/the GIS program, if you let the thing go to "screensaver" mode while it's uploading, sometimes it locks and does not upload properly.

So I couldn't just set it and forget it, I had to sit there for the 20 or so minutes, periodically joggling the mouse, so that it wouldn't do that.

To keep from being terminally bored (and because I didn't want to log onto anything as "eccentric" as Ravelry, seeing as this was a public computer lab that is technically reserved for student use), I went to Yahoo news and started looking around at some of the more unusual stories.

One of the ones they had had to do with Kate Middleton being distantly related to Jane Austen.

I thought that was kind of a nice little story. Granted, it's not a real close connection - I think my relation to Winston Churchill is actually fewer degrees of separation than hers is to Austen - but it's the kind of little pointless thing that it makes me happy to know.

I admit I was taken aback (but probably should not be; I've been on the Internet for years and I should now be used to the sort of attitudes one runs into) by the comments. Several people were all eye-rolly about "HOW IS THIS NEWS?" (well, okay, it really ISN'T, but that's why it was on the "entertainment news" page or somesuch). A lot of people pooh-poohed the whole genealogy-linked-up thing, a few accused the news source of shilling for Ancestry.com (which is apparently the site that figured the link out). And on, and on.

And, I don't know. I found the comments somewhat...I don't know. Taking the time to write a comment on how a story offends you by its pointlessness?

The thing is, I like odd fluffy little facts like the one presented by the story. Those are the kinds of facts that stick in my mind. Like, the fact that Tootsie Rolls were the first commercially-available individually wrapped candy, and that they were introduced in 1896.

I read that somewhere. I have no idea WHY I remember it, I just DO. I'm that way with a lot of odd, useless little facts. (Back when Trivial Pursuit was popular, no one in my family or friends would play against me without some kind of "handicapping," like that ALL the questions I had to answer were the sports questions - the one field of knowledge I'm not so up on).

But I like knowing those weird little things. In a strange way, it makes me happy.

(My freakish memory also does work with some more purposeful stuff; I'm extremely good at remembering the scientific names of species, and not just species I work with regularly. It's the same kind of thing. I think it's because the fact is a little bit "unusual" in some way, it manages to hook into my brain.)

But I like those silly, fluffy, pointless little stories. They seem to provide a nice balance for the Big Scary Sad stories that we deal with every day.

I think in a way it's linked to my love of things like Strauss waltzes (and I think I finally have the Pandora channel I use most often "trained," finally: it serves up mostly late 19th c. waltzes, British Light Music, and the occasional brass-band march. For a while it was giving me a lot of opera, and while some is OK (especially the lighter stuff), too many soprano arias wear on me after a while.)

I guess what it is, is that I find being a grown-up to be such SRS BZNSS that I need to have a few things around me that are un-serious. I like being able to thing about things that are just light and fluffy and don't necessarily have a big meaning. Things like going to a fancy tea somewhere (which I intend to do, sometime, at least once in my life) where I get to dress up and sit at a table with friends or family and drink tea and eat fancy little sandwiches. Or going to a quilt shop with money in my pocket and just buying a stack of fat quarters and thinking about the quilt I will make with them. Or watching cartoons on television. Or making my bed with nice fresh clean sheets and putting a pretty quilt on it and setting a couple of the amigurumi and soft toys I've made (OK, more than a "couple") next to the pillow for decoration. Or browsing around on Etsy for cute and fun jewelry*...

I get tired of seriousness and work and being so grown-up all the time that it's nice to deal with some things that aren't serious for a change.

(* that actually has a purpose. I now have a 'favorites list' of some inexpensive items...looking toward the swap I am participating in. Sadly, "pre-raphaelite" turns nothing up, but "vintage" brings up some interesting things, as does "Anglophile" and "Francophile.")