Molly arrived the day after one of the two baby pigeons succumbed to the heat. I did not consider this a bad omen. I'm still in Athens and dealing with the pigeons. Originally one of my goals was to make it to one of these little Greek islands I always hear about. It's an hour's trip just to reach the port with all the ferries and then a day or two commitment of time. Granted, in theory most of it would be focussed on fun and leisure but neither of us were feeling very adventurous in the mid to high 90's heat.
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The heat never stopped us from going out and walking the city. I walked 40 minutes one way to an audio store to buy a record player and speakers before meandering my way back home. I think it was 97 that day. Not being a morning person in Athens (or NYC), I never seemed to get going to run errands until late morning or early afternoon. In other words, only the HOTTEST part of any day. Fortunately there are bodegas everywhere with water which I drank a lot... the water, not the bodegas! I had the record player hooked up before Molly came in from Armenia last Friday. The next day we went record shopping... once it got up to 96. wilt
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Molly is a news junkie and so am I to a degree but not on her level. She spent most of her time editing her book or scrolling through the tragedy of everything in the world. She's nearing the finish of a first draft on her book and has been hyper focussed on it. It begins in Russia, late 1800's and follows the history of the Jewish Labor Bund to Poland, and wraps up around the time Israel was formed. So pretty cheery stuff. At one point I think she had written close to 400K words, she's been researching all the info like a PHD student writing a dissertation. She's been whittling it down into a more manageable length. I'm her sound board by default. We kind of live together, so I've had a large portion of those 400K words read to me in unedited form! Sadly, my brain doesn't retain all this juicy information so when I'm at a party or something and find myself in a conversation about WW1 or 2 , or Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin, I can only recall just enough information to get myself into a corner. Then everyone thinks I only glanced over the Cliff notes about the Russian revolution. My main contribution to Molly's process is making bad jokes about Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. Czar Nicholas doesn't escape our skewering wit either! But these jokes are only funny to us in that moment.
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While Molly obsessively edits, I managed to finish thumb nailing the rest of Toxic Avenger #3 and have even started penciling the first few pages. I also continued the struggle against the pigeons. I replaced the nasty white plastic netting to keep the pigeons off the front balcony. Molly had hired a guy who worked at the hardware store to install the netting on a previous trip when I wasn't here. It mostly worked but it was an eye sore. We tried chicken wire this time. It came in a roll and was a meter and a half wide so I cut the lower part of the plastic stuff off and managed to attach the wire now dubbed, “pigeon wire”, in it's place and looks much better. If it is still working by our next visit I'll be doing the rest.
Molly and I ate at a new restaurant last night, I had my first plate of Cuttlefish and snagged a few bites of her squid. It was a nice cool 87 degrees at 11 pm so we ate outside in the alley dining section. It was amazing! We followed up with some drinks at another nice cafe' not far from the restaurant. There was no wind last night so the mugginess just wrapped us up and drenched us. I briefly learned how to ask for red wine in Greek and to ask for a second. But like I said, “briefly”. I will have to practice more!