Cav's Place

This year’s first heat wave is just ending and I’m taking the opportunity to bunch together several updates. All of them will be personal, but there frankly seems to be very little chance of me writing anything else during the World Cup, or at least during the group phase, seeing as I’m watching all matches and there are three of them per day.

The heat wave properly started on Friday, with highs between 34°C and 37°C until yesterday despite earlier forecasts saying we won’t get more than 32°C during the first half of the month. It ended last evening in a pretty impressive manner, with a thunderstorm. The rain was heavy, I’m quite sure there was hail as well, there was a fair bit of wind… And I’ll fill you in on the lightning later. Either way, today it’s better and the forecast for the coming days mentions highs below 30°C and a lot of storms.
I assume we’ll get far worse than this in the coming months, so it was only an opportunity to “train” and make sure I’m still able to handle high temperatures as well as I usually can. And that went well enough, with the exception of mornings, when I can’t quite manage to keep myself from waking up, nor can I get back to sleep after I do wake up. Sweaty and itchy balls are a good part of the reason for that, but I was never quite able to properly manage my body temperature in the morning, so I wake up feeling hot and thirsty, but it goes away after a while. Seems to be better now that I took to sleeping naked, but I’m still sleeping too little, even with an added nap between the second and third matches of the day.
The computer seems to be struggling a little with the temperatures though, as I’m seeing the CPU core temperatures go up to 68°C and the GPU temperature go up to 58°C without me being in a game. But I’m sure the coolers can do more than that, and in fact there were moments when I heard them speed up for a while and then slow back down, so I assume it has everything under control. A little worried about the UPS though, as this model doesn’t monitor its temperature and I think it gets quite hot under these circumstances.

Lightning struck the building during yesterday’s storm. I was just looking out, everything turned electric blue for a moment and I could just make out that “electric” sound among a deafening peal of tunder. Next I looked, it was saying network cable unplugged and my switch had the port going to my computer turned off. The network guys replaced whatever fried on their end today, but the port I used for the “in” cable on my switch was fried as well. Sacrificed itself to stop it from going further to the computers I guess. Luckily there are two desktops, one laptop and the line going in, and there are five ports, so had one free to move the “in” cable to and the rest seem unaffected. But one more of these and I’ll need a new switch. Still, much better a new switch than a new computer!
It was quite an impressive moment, but the results weren’t exactly pleasing. Just goes to show that there is a weak link and I should take some precautions, as I rely on the UPS to take care of any power surges potentially caused by storms and tend to forget that the Internet cable can become a potential threat at such times as well.

Some may consider this to be too much information, but I’m just writing it for myself. A while back I was going to take a shower, got undressed and then decided to brush my teeth as well. So I ended up unintentionally taking a good look at my naked self in the bathroom mirror, which then became intentional as I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t exactly bothered by what I saw, from the neck down at least. I’m still thin as ever, but I seem to have put a little muscle on as well, so now it no longer strikes me as a crappy look. I guess that, even though I don’t do much, sticking to this little schedule of working out for so many years did produce some results.
It wasn’t something that I particularly cared or even thought about, but I took it as a given that I really didn’t like how I looked, so this was surprising. That still applies to my face and, more than anything, to the lack of hair on my head, plus that of course I’d still like to magically replace all of my skin with one that has no problems and also looks better, but even the problems I know seem less obvious lately, which is a bit surprising since normally they’d flare up in the heat. But, speaking of skin, the angle also helped, seeing as I’m so terribly bothered by obviously raised moles of any size and also by dark flat ones of significant size, say starting from about five millimeters, and I unfortunately do have two of the latter, but they’re not visible from that angle.

The book fair was last week, so I went on the first day, which was Wednesday, as there would have been fewer people and lower temperatures than on the following days. Unfortunately, nothing caught my eye, which isn’t exactly surprising since I actually found myself looking solely for books in English that I’d want to read, not even having a good look through the few other things that I usually spent a little time browsing, and that bookstore I found there two years ago, which focuses on mainly fantasy and science fiction books in English, was once again not present. Yet there were two more places where I could have found something interesting, but all I found was disappointment caused by not finding anything interesting.
It was even worse when I actually stopped by that bookstore after leaving the fair, as they’re relatively nearby and they announced discounts for the duration of the fair, just like last year. I fully expected to find at least a few interesting things there, the question being only whether or not I could get myself to make a purchase. Yet there was nothing I wanted. I sat there long enough to have a good look through just about everything, despite the feeling of “I’m in someone’s home and am bothering” generated by the fact that I was the only customer in there and they were apparently checking their inventory, yet I simply couldn’t find anything I wanted.
That sucks. According to the original plan, I should be reading at least four more books this year, none of them being translations. (According to what I’d do if I’d have access to a practically endless supply, I should be reading at least a book every two weeks, and preferably one per week, but that will never again happen.) So I was certainly counting on getting at least two, if not actually four, during this fair. Yet I didn’t get anything and I didn’t even see anything I wanted, so I was left with a really bad feeling afterwards…