Season of Summer

I thought we were done with poppies for the summer, but more blooms have appeared.  These later blooms seem paler than the ones from earlier in the spring.    Decades ago, our landladies had a field of poppies in their other lot that seemed to bloom all Summer; if memory serves, they were orange, yellow, and red.  Maybe the seeds dropping from our pods will be viable and we will get a second round of the flowers in early September -- although I'm not sure how that works.


Tuesday, the temperature got up to the low nineties.  The house did not really cool down until something like 1 or 2 AM.  Mark had set up some air-conditioning units, but the one in our room wasn't blowing cold air; I guess the coolant had leaked out over the winter or something.  Luckily, the daytime temperatures have gone back to Summertime normals in the mid 80's.

I had forgotten how much infrared light gets through the writing pavilion after the sun visits the Solstice Station.  The trick to keeping it cool is to open up all the sides, even the west one, so that any  breeze cane come through.  It does mean that 4 PM does get uncomfortably hot.


I've been reading short stories of Philip K Dick.  Some of the more anxious scenes in "Bladerunner" put me off of the movie, so much so that I'd never had a desire to read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep."  The collection I'm reading contains "The Minority Report," (again, the movie didn't look interesting to me), which I finally read.

So far the stories I've gotten through are from the late 1950's and '60's.   The plots seem to be, Captain of Industry / Government Stakeholder encounters Cold-War-inspired McGuffin which threatens the status quo of a morally-ambigous-to-unjust social system, and must sacrifice to save an institution that isn't the best, but is the best we've got.  "It's not what you think it is," tone, not quite entering the "Jar of Tang" trope only because the characters are gravely mistaken about a great many things.

The stories aren't happy in a "good guy defeats the monster, saves the world, and gets the girl," kind of way; I'm waiting for one that doesn't feel so pessimistic -- but they do raise interesting questions like, "What would a justice system look like if precognitives saw you doing the crime before you did it?"... Which, now that I think about it, is sort of a secular take on Original Sin.