The sky darkened, the thunder, the rain, the power fluctuated. That was the thunderstorm this afternoon. But then it brightened. Despite the rain, the sky got bright, and I raced to take these photos. I don’t know if you can see it, but it is pouring rain at the time I took them, and the sun was out.

I generally don’t like the rain. But I do like the sun. And the rain is okay in my book when the sun is out.

(That’s my car on the right, the blue one. I’d been thinking about washing it earlier, too. Glad I didn’t).

… about not having any Fourth of July plans (aside for spending a quiet evening at home running the dishwasher, doing laundry, some cleaning, and reading), is that I’m not worried about my plans for tonight being washed away. Holy mother, that is one heck of a thunderstorm rolling overhead — boom-shaka-boom-laka! Hope Sketchy put the top up on his Jeep.

A hard rock cover of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Speaking of which (sort of), I found a pretty hard rockin’ cover of Mexican Radio by (the song, not 99.1!) a group called Authority Zero. I’m generally not much into covers, but this one does the original justice (although of course, Voodoo’s remains my favorite).

I got in at ten of eleven.

I did the dishes. Newbie brought in some DVDs, and we took the TV and DVD player out of Gary’s office and set it up on the front counter. Gary and Newbie had some trouble getting the player to work — they couldn’t find the remote and the player didn’t want to allow them to use the buttons on the machine. Finally, Gary got it to work — “Magic!” was all he said when I asked how.

With the dishes done, me, Newbie, and Sketchy stood around the counter watching Waiting (very appropriate). Gary brought up a stool and set himself up with paperwork on the end of the cut table.

This is how we spent the next hour. In the un-air-conditioned Indy, sweating, watching a movie about a bunch of over-sexed twenty-somethings working in a restaraunt. It was all very boring.

Around twelve, a couple stopped in for slices. Sketchy, standing by the slice-rack (and thusly, next to the TV, which was set up right there), didn’t think to put the movie on pause, so I walked over and did it. It was the scene where Luiz Guzman is trying to talk his hot girlfriend into having sex in the bathroom. The girl was in the process of saying “sex” when I stopped it — the older couple, I don’t think, would’ve appreciated the content.

Sketchy told me “good thinking!” and I just starred at him. I’d told both him and Newbie that if customers walked in, the movie was going to need pausing.

Anyway, that signalled the end of my day. I was only scheduled for the lunch rush. “Go,” he said to me, and like the wind, I was gone, eighty minutes exactly after when I’d walked in.

Last night wasn’t great … well, in terms of how it stacked up to the weekend, it was, but as a standalone Monday night, it was decent. I brought The Last Lion: Visions of Glory, the first of a two part Winston Churchill into work to keep myself occupied. I was pretty sure we’d be slow enough I’d get about a hundred pages into it (it’s close to 900). Instead, I got about sixty … (and I’m still in the prologue!) It’s turning out to be an interesting book … even this tiny bit into it, there’s a lot of stuff about the man I had no idea (I had similar revelations about FDR reading Conrad Black’s biography).

About Churchill,

Attlee said: “Energy and poetry … sum him up.” But nothing sums him up. He was too many people. If ever there was a Renaissance man, he was it. In the age of the specialist, he was the antithesis, our Leonardo. As a writer he was a reporter, novelist, essayist, critic, historian, and biographer. As a statesman he served, becoming His Majesty’s first magristrate, as minister for the colonies and for trade, home affairs, finance, and all three of the armed forces. Away from his desk he was at various times an airplane pilot, artist, farmer, fencer, hunter, breeder of racehorses, polo player, collector of tropical fish, and shooter of wild animals in Africa. One felt he could do anything. That was why he seemed inevitable in 1940. Bernard Shaw said: “The moment we got a good fright, and had to find a man who could and would do something, we were on our knees to Winston Churchill.”

Like I said, it’s an engrossing book. Last night, I searched Limewire and found some recordings of some of his famous speeches. I’ve read them before (for fun), and now I had the opportunity to listen to them. I tell you what, it’s chilling to listen him, even sixty-plus years after the dark days of the War, he has this presence that still manifests itself, and I almost forgot that I was sitting in a room in an apartment on America’s east coast, as opposed to a room in a house in a nation under threat of Nazi invasion.

(from his speech given June 4, 1940, following the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk, France, which I was listening to last night)

“…Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”