We're Having A Heat Wave

Well, dear friends... the mercury cracked 100° in the city of New York today, and according to the folks at Accuweather, with their RealFeel™ temperature reading, it felt like 107°. And no, it wasn't dry heat.

It was, in fact, the wettest, most suffocatingly clingy, nastily oppressive heat it's been my misfortune ever to have experienced first hand.

That having been said, the day was not without it's charms. As you know, I've been temping for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the good folks at the NRDC elected to close the office early today, and ejected us all onto the boiling pavement at 1:00 p.m. I had briefly considered lollygagging in a park to enjoy the sunshine, but I immediately started feeling asthma-like heaviness in my chest, and my breathing and my voice both took on the quality they do during the very worst of my allergies, so I high-tailed it home and traded the full-on baking heat of direct sunlight for the more genteel, less pushy baking heat of my apartment.

Having done that, I took it easy around the apartment until it was time to meet Kevin & Kirsten Lageman and Ken Bolden for a delightful late supper at Virgil's BBQ restaurant on 44th in midtown. I'd never been to Virgil's, and boy, am I glad to have rectified that particular character flaw. Let's just say we had some goooood eats. I also had a rather fantastic frozen marguerita. It's been so long since I'd had it, I'd forgotten how much I loved BBQ-style food.

I have to say, though, that I never expected to become the sort of person the highlight of whose day was nothing more than sitting down to a good meal. Truth be told, that's not such an ignoble thing to shoot for; and even if it were, I think all the rules are suspended in this fucking heat. I've never experienced anything like it. And it certainly makes me laugh (in a wholly bitterly ironic way, you can be sure) to suffer through this heat while remembering that the Bush Administration has finally admited that Global Warming is happening, and it's happening because we burn too many fossil fuels and create too many chloroflorocarbons, but this "global warming" thing may not be such a bad thing. Hell, the growing season is getting longer in much of the country!

Who cares that the rest of us are being treated like those sad little brownie cakes in an E-Z Bake Oven®?!?

Okay, so it's official: I am, at least according to my dear friend Toni Schlemmer, a full-fledged geek. I made the mistake of describing to her my new obsession: Neverwinter Nights - a fantastic new fantasy role-playing game for your computer. But, oh, my friends, it doesn't stop there. Although Neverwinter Nights can be played as a one-person computer game, it is, in fact, oh so much more. It comes with all the fixin's to allow you to literally play what is essentially the paper & pencil version of Dungeons & Dragons online with your friends. Not just some pre-made story (although you can play that one, too), but it also gives you to the tools to create your own adventures, and to take a bunch of players through it. Just like real D&D!!!

I'm practically in a swoon. I've been waiting for something like this ever since I discovered PC games in the early 90's. And if you'd really like to know (and too bad if you don't), I was trying to figure out a way to do it way back before I had my first PC, when I had an awful pre-PC word processing machine!

So, until my fellow D&D geeks can be persuaded to purchase the software and get online and play with me, I have to content myself with obsessing over the single-player, pre-made game. I know what you're thinking, my friends, and yes, it would be easy to get online and find just any ol' geeks to play the game with, and I'm not saying I won't try it, but the fact of the matter is that D&D was never so much about the game as it was about the social time with friends who were too busy otherwise to find time to hang out. And since now I don't even live in the same state, let alone the same city as those guys, I think I can be forgiven my geek-out and excitement over what could open up a whole new way to hang out. Do you hear that Dean? Start saving your scheckels.