Version 2.111

I spent most of the day making bone broth and reading. A while back I purchased "The Forty Rules of Love" on impulse. I am very interested in Middle Eastern culture and this sounded promising because, even though it is fiction, it talks about Rumi and Sufism. Plus, the author, Elif Shafak, is a Turkish woman, which intrigued me. It turns out that this book made the BBC list of the 100 novels that shaped our world. I am one-third into the book and so far it had been easy to read.

Too often, when we think of the Middle East, we think of the dark clothes and lack of color, however, there is so much color in how the different cultures prepare food, decorate homes and in public buildings. The same thing happens with the Portuguese dictatorship period: in my mind it always seems dark, probably because of the black and white photos and film, and the black dress code adopted by women after their husbands passed. But of course it wasn't so, that's what I think every time I see the summer photos my Portuguese friends post on Instagram and Facebook: things are so colorful, the blue of the sky and sea, the light yellow of beach sand, the lush vegetation.

At the end of the day, I saw a video of a rescue in California: two firefighters were surrounded by flames and a helicopter went out to get them. It is remarkable how calm everyone was and in the end, as they are flying away, one of them says "Thank you for coming." As California burns, we are expecting two storms on the East Coast: Marco could become a hurricane by Monday and it will make landfall on Tuesday; Laura is expected to reach hurricane status on Tuesday and make landfall the following day. The effects of the two storms will overlap in some areas. We're supposed to have the most active hurricane season since 2005, thus we will be going into the election with hurricanes and tropical storms everywhere.

The rest of the year is going to be very bad...