The Fourth was relatively quiet until about an hour or so ago, when some neighbors started off a round of fireworks (I’ll never understand what makes people with half a brain think that it’s okay to light off explosives around foliage, but I guess that’s just me). The town was almost eerily deserted the whole three-day weekend, with a lot of people, I imagine, taking extended trips out of town. From the looks of the 917.1 section at the main branch of the AADL, the destination of choice was Ontario and/or Quebec … all of the books about the eastern region of Canada were checked out when I looked on Friday evening. We took the beagle on walks on Saturday and Sunday and the schoolyards we went to were as quiet as cemeteries. It was kind of nice — the lull before the storm that will be the Art Fair in a matter of two weeks.
The weather was kind of mild compared with the heat we had during the majority of June. The Detroit News ran an article today that said that June 2005 was the hottest June on record in southeast Michigan, with the only hotter June having been in 1933. It sure felt that way. This weekend, though, was not as humid as many recent days have been, and the temps were in the 70s and 80s. The exception was today, when the temperature got back into the 90s, but a fairly strong storm barreled in from Lake Michigan late this afternoon and drenched the area for an hour or so. I walked to the supermarket around five — our block doesn’t have a lot of tree cover, so you can see the horizon to the west with a relatively unimpeded view. The sky to the west was an amazing shade of slate as the thunderheads made their way east. You could even smell the storm coming — I can’t describe the smell, really, except to say that it definitely smelled like Lake Michigan.
