Hello, dear readers! First, allow me to apologize for the lack of blog last week. The site crashed on Tuesday night and I didn’t have time until Thursday morning to deal with it. Thankfully, we’re back up and running. And now, on to the blog!

As appeared to be the case in much of the northern hemisphere last week, it was HOT in Chicago (with the added midwestern bonus of humidity on top of that). I…don’t cope well with heat. I’ve been having some issues regulating my body temperature anyway (I seem to never be cold when everyone around me says it’s freezing indoors), and then our air conditioner went on strike in protest of having to work so hard to keep up. So last week was pretty miserable a lot of the time, and I was pretty focused on just getting through it. The heat finally broke over the weekend, and that was absolutely lovely.

This week has been more manageable in terms of temperature, and after giving our air conditioner a cleaning over the weekend, it seems to be working better. I still feel gross a lot of the time, but it’s better than last week.

Despite the weather, there’s been a lot to be happy about the past couple of weeks. Here are a few of those things:

1. Good movies. In an effort to be in better air conditioning than what our sad little window unit could provide, we went to about as many movies in the space of a week as we often do in a year, and they were all great. We saw Ocean’s 8, which totally lived up to the trailers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the Mister Rogers documentary, which left the audience in sniffles, and Incredibles 2, which was hilarious and adorable. All highly recommended.
2. Good friends. Between seeing movies and just making some other plans, I got to see a lot of friends in the past couple of weeks, including a couple we almost never get to see anymore. That was lovely.
3. Good news. While yes, there’s been a lot in the news to be horrified about, I’ve gotten some personal good news at work – I got a bonus, and managed to move some projects I’d kind of been dreading forward with a minimal amount of distress.