The upstairs air conditioning has been out for a week. This happens yearly, around this time (though usually in mid/late May). The hvac people are coming by to install a new something yesterday (i.e. they haven’t showed up yet). Meanwhile, I get used to Real Air. In the Ohio River Valley, that’s not necessarily a good or even healthy thing. Driving up I-75 past the industrial zone often causes my lungs to ache for an hour.

But the heat takes it out of me, as well as the jet lag, from which I still suffer a few aftereffects. My mind is a sieve, though getting better, and I still want to nap constantly, though the desire to do so lessens. And in a week and a half, it’s all moot since I travel yet again to Barcelona. However, it’s now familiar territory, and I look forward to a known (slightly) place, not a trip into the unknown. It would help if I’d picked up a few words in Catalan, but no such luck.

Found the last cicada today. It was lying on the driveway beside my car, quite dead. It was frozen in a perfect cicada pose – not mangled or torn. A perfect thing to put into a scrap book of sorts, a memory book. But then I came to my senses, tossed the thing down, and got into the car. Anyway, why choose to memorialize one particular arthropod out of several billion possible choices? Makes as much sense as memorializing a molecule of oxygen.

There’s a famous exercise in computation that Fermi would give his students, asking them to figure out the probability of there being a molecule of oxygen in your next breath that was also in Julius Caesar’s last breath. The probability is 99% or so.

Perhaps this means that even the sporadically bountiful arthropods whose invasion we in southwestern Ohio have just lived through have their individual uniquenesses. Or not. But it’s oddly comforting to think so.

And I still want my air conditioning back.