The bonus is the ninja wheel.

Current sitting on the train waiting for it to leave. I was just having a discussion with people about how America's train network is bad, and to be fair a lot of it is extremely bad (if you're not a freight container), but at least in Chicago I can take the L from my home downtown, take the bus from the L stop to the train station--well, I could have, I walked--and then take the train from Chicago out to the suburbs to visit my family. Not owning a car saves our family quite a lot of money, which is good considering how much we spend on health care even with good insurance.

The weather continues to be awful. Today it's 31°C (feels like 36°) with 81% humidity, about the temperature it's been all week and the temperature it's going to be until Monday. We kept getting threats of a thunderstorm and it kept not happening, except for maybe a few drops of rain here and there. On Sunday, Laila had a make-up swimming lesson and literally right before I was going to leave, I checked my phone and there was a warning about a massive thunderstorm sweeping through with winds up to 45 mph, possible tree branch falls, and a note to seek shelter immediately and not to go outside. I broke the news to Laila, who had been eagerly shouting about going swimming, and she got quiet and walked over to her room. When I asked her if she wanted me to hang out with her in room or read her a story, she looked up at me, said, "No" and shut the door.

She ended up taking an angry nap. I told that to the other dads at the Jewish dads meeting I went to and they were very impressed--one said it was a better way of dealing with her frustration than they managed sometimes.

It turned out that we did not get anything more than a few raindrops, but that's because the rain went north of us. Ravinia got multiple inches in an hour.

Train's moving. Time to get back to reading.

It's currently 27°C but the weather report says it feels like ‎35° and it's only 9 a.m. Fortunately, it's supposed to start raining this afternoon and that will drop the temperature 10°C, which, well, every little bit helps. Our poor aircon was struggling over the weekend to keep up with the sun hitting the bricks and streaming into the windows of our condo and it's probably up there trying its best now. Next month we'll need to have someone out to check up on the HVAC to make sure it's working well--it's one of those things that you're supposed to do every year but money has been tight.

Speaking of money, I have finally decided to crack down and go iron-handed on the budgeting. sashagee has given me the go-ahead to put her on a strict budget--on our shared money at least, she can do whatever she wants with her monthly salary that I pay her--and since I've been using Quicken (and Microsoft Money before that) for decades at this point, I finally downloaded the app and synced it on both of our phones so she can see our budget at a glance. We'd been going over budget for a while and this will let us figure out where the money is going...or would if I didn't already know where it's going. It's going into healthcare costs and food.

It's always going to healthcare costs and food.

I finished a book recently--Delta Green, the RPG that's a mix of the X-Files and Call of Cthulhu--and when I looked at my Goodreads account I saw that I'm fourteen books behind on my reading goals for this year. I used to read eighty books a year before the Plague Years, but everything got thrown for a loop after that. After Delta Green I picked up Surprised by G-d by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, which I've had in my 積ん読 (tsundoku, "Buying books without reading them") pile for a while. I'm a third of the way through and my big take-away at the moment is that it's weirdly similar to one of those evangelical "I used to be a sinner but I Saw The Light" memoirs. Rabbi Ruttenberg was a punk kid who hung out in Chicago going to shows--she namedrops The Alley on Belmont so props for that--and thought that G-d and Torah were dumb old traditions with no meaning in modern times. But she took a trip with her father to the camps in Europe, and then later her mother died of cancer and she started going back to shul, and I haven't gotten there yet but I'm waiting for the part where she Sees The Light. I mean, she's a rabbi now, I know where this is going. It's not affecting my enjoyment of the book, it's just surprising to me how well it maps onto The Standard Narrative. But there's still seventy percent of the book to go, so we'll see where the road leads.