Riding shotgun.

What a day today: hot and breezy in the morning, the sky a sunny hot blue, even the angel turned supplicant. In the evening, rain falling for hours, puddling the yard and sprinkling us on the porch, while we sat here with our computers, building our various knowledges and splitting our box of Russell Stover assorted dark chocolates. (My friend and I turn out to be perfectly matched in chocolate consumption, as in so many things; she prefers the creams and nougats, while I would eat all the caramels right this second if I didn't know better.)

This afternoon, we set out on a luckless trip to find lunch--luckless (the restaurants closed) but for the fact that the day was still lovely and we were cascading over the county's hills and I was taking pictures out the window while she drove. (This is how we ended up with the box of chocolates.)


Then, unexpectedly, sometime around 4 p.m. the disaster siren started up in Gambier, because we were under a tornado warning. We proceeded to watch the progress of the storm on a variety of television channels (we happened to be at my excellent friends' house, cooking some leftovers for lunch). Eventually we ascertained, with the best of our midwestern intuitive abilities, that neither we nor the houses we're occupying were going to blow away, and so we ventured back to my front porch. And here we have been for hours and hours. I continue to learn bibliographic and book-collecting terms from ABC for Book Collectors. I didn't tell you yesterday's favorite:

bisquing: obliterating passages in a printed book by painting them out with black ink or paint or over-printing with a blank block, usually undertaken in the interests of censorship or cancellation for some other reason.

Today, I have fallen hard for the fact that I now know why we refer to capital letters (or majuscules) as "upper case" and small letters (or miniscules) as "lower case":

case: a large shallow tray divided into compartments to contain type. The frequency of use and therefore quantity determined the size of the compartments, which were similarly arranged to be convenient to the compositor's hand. The upper case contained the majuscules, the lower case miniscules.

But then there's this one, which strikes me as so strangely resonant and melancholy, in ways I can't even talk about:

conjugate leaves: the leaves which "belong to one another," i.e. if traced into and out of the back of the book, are found to form a single piece of paper, are said to be "conjugate."... [N]on-conjugate leaves are sometimes called singletons.

The rain kept pushing over us, for hours and hours, until finally it pushed past, right about the time our dinner arrived. People have shuffled past nearly silent all night long; branches have toppled from nearby trees; we're pretty certain we heard a heavy animal rolling around earlier; we are absolutely certain that we listened to part of cats' mating earlier. But then, over and above all this wet rustle and sodden squelching, the moon made its full appearance after all, if a bit misted and fogged. I have high hopes that tomorrow's moon will come up huge and red, a fat mid-July rising.