Not quite stream of consciousness…well, yeah, really, it is.

Sometimes writing is easy, and all you have to do is get out of the way and keep typing. Today is not like that. I just spent about four hours composing an entry for my business blog, and it was very much like slogging through molasses. In winter. Carrying luggage. It's an okay entry and all, but I don't think it contains four hours' worth of value.

The news is, once again, too sad to watch. Terrible tornados in Oklahoma, where the sheer volume of destruction and death is staggering. And there was a firefighter killed yesterday in Dallas. That story really gets to me. The fire crews had been working inside the building for a while when they saw it was about to collapse. They called for all the firefighters to get out, but Stanley Wilson couldn't. He communicated with the men outside by radio, telling them he was trapped and didn't know where he was. Then they lost radio contact, and later found his body. I'd like to think he had a peaceful end, but it seems unlikely. A friend of mine, an aeronautical engineer, once had the job of investigating military air crew deaths. There was one particular incident where the pilot had ejected properly, but the parachute on his ejection seat never deployed. So he had a long fall to think about what was happening. I wonder how many times he thought, "But they told me this would save my life."

Terrible.

All right, let's lighten things up here. I've actually had some work that past week or so! That's a very good thing, but I've been doing a lot of research in addition to writing, so I've been sitting at my desk a lot. A lot. My hindquarters would like for me to earn enough money to switch to a treadmill desk, and soon. (Yeah, that's right after a pump espresso machine on the shopping list.)

I have to make my first 2013 Oktoberfest appearance before Southlake City Council tonight, assuming they don't cancel because of bad weather. And my next-to-last meeting of the Chamber's Executive Board is a few hours before that, ditto on the weather thing. I asked the Chamber president if the meeting might be canceled, since we'll be parked at a bank (our Chair Elect is president of it, and they have this mondo-beautiful board room he lets us use). The Chamber president said he'd let us know if we were going to cancel—and called dibs on parking under the cover at the bank's drive up teller windows. (Funny guy.)

On an unrelated note, I think I'm in love with Michael Kitchen. Or, more accurately, his character on Foyle's War.* We've been watching the series on Netflix for a while, because Rich thought it looked interesting and quickly got into it. I wasn't enthusiastic at first, but lately I've gotten wrapped up in the characters. While Rich was out of town last week, I decided to go back and re-watch the first few episodes, to get the setup and see how the characters came together now that I'm familiar with them. I don't know what was going on when we watched them the first time, but I only remembered about half of the episodes. I mean, literally, about half of each episode. I remember one scene but not the next one. I may have been knitting and not much paying attention, or I may have dozed through it (I tend to watch TV at night stretched out on the sofa, which is also a most excellent position for napping). In any case, I'm hooked now. And I'm delighted it's coming back for another season. (Of course, that's the BBC definition of 'season,' as in four new episodes.)

Not much else of substance to say. Everybody in the flat middle part of the US, stay safe through this weather we have going on.

*Actors, meh. Taciturn police detective chief superintendents who don't drive and always wear a tie, even when they're fly fishing, oooh, baby!