The Month in Review and of Things to Come

It's been a long month.  Thirty-one days.  It has also been an unproductive and terribly depressing month, but fear not.  I won't bore you with the minutiae of my life; well, no more than I usually do.

The East Atlanta Beer Festival was easily the high point.  Fifty-seven beer producers and one hundred forty something different beers.  It was also the low point in the month, as I ended up going alone, unable to convince any of my friends to go out on a Saturday afternoon and drink beer (A much tougher sell that I would have thought!).  Either I'm old, or we--my friends, and I--are old.  Regardless of the truth, I'm telling myself that everyone else is old and I remain unchanged...

In such a long month and with so much underemployment you would think I'd recount how much reading I've gotten done, and you would be very very wrong.  I read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick.  I also read about three hundred pages worth of short stories from George R R Martin's Dreamsongs Volume II.  So I got a door stopper in this month and that's good, I failed to leave comments for anything let alone two books, and I feel no less weary for laziness.  Franzen was great.  Swanwick was a wonderful novel where Darger and Surplus, long running short story characters of the authors, felt forced into the narrative rather than the book being about or build around them.  Martin's short stories were exactly what I needed to be reading at that specific point in time.  And I'll have more to say about one of them in a day or so.   

I've no expectations of June.  I'm taking a hiatus from assigning myself books to read in a given time period seeing how poorly I failed in May.  That said, I have a stack of books, I'd like to get through by summer's end. 

The biggest, and lamest, thing to talk about for this past month is the weather.  It was 71 degrees last night at 1:30am.  My poor air conditioning unit can't keep up and I'm dreading the bill.  I don't complain about being hot because I've lived through winter in Chicago and I know what the wind off Lake Michigan feels like in February.  I also know at what temperature below zero your breath will freeze over.  I don't complain about the heat, but allow me a comment that few who haven't lived here and fully appreciate.  It's hot.  More specifically this heat is usually reserved for August so I'm a bit scared of what's to come. 

Hoping for eternal rain in June...