Well, hello there! I’ve been doing my best to keep from going outside for any reason at all. This is hard to do since the wife has gone to Colorado for moral support and washing machine replacement. Over the last week, the daily average has been somewhere between hell and a much warmer spot (Phoenix). I have a Mini-Max thermometer and it told me on Friday that the highest temperature reached was 101 degrees (fahrenhot). Since the actual thermometer is on the front porch, I aimed my camera out the front door and zoomed in on the reading. Hah! I didn’t have to go outside!
At night is has been a little more reasonable – only hitting the low 80’s. I’d mow my jungle lawn, but I’m afraid that the lawn tractor will go up in a burst of flame (not to mention the plastic of the seat adhering to my seat). Mowing at 0300 is probably not a good idea either.
Yesterday, a little lost cloud passed over my house and in a freakish set of circumstances let loose with a huge blast of thunder at exactly the same time my cat landed on the floor after jumping off the couch. I jumped a foot, but suffice it to say that the cat jumped further – around 15 feet if I measured correctly. When last seen, she was headed horizontally across the floor in hovercat mode about three inches off the floor. She didn’t even respond to my calls of ‘crunchy!’ until the storm had passed. Even then she repeatedly looked at me as if I’d done it on purpose.
Today it is only as hot as the approaches to hell: a mere 84. It is partly cloudy (a condition the weather-guessers insist on calling ‘partly sunny’) and there is a very small breeze blowing once in a while. I did get my lawn mowed however. It was rapid and required that I actually leave the house so I made it fast and ducked back inside right away. As I gaze out the window, I can see little ridges of grass where, in my haste, I didn’t quite get over far enough and left a trail.
Boredom has set in. I’ve watched enough satellite TV to pay for my outrageous billing for the month and have reverted back to books. I’ve started Tom Clancy’s latest book, which weighs in at approximately 5 pounds (weight, not monetary) and contains over 700 pages. I’m halfway through it and enjoying it thoroughly. A week ago, I ended up at Ollie’s (a local “we have everything” store) and bought three more backup books just in case this heat wave continues past December.
I sat at the table this morning eating my cereal and had a random thought: Why did all the cereal companies drop the use of waxed paper for liners? Waxed paper kept a great seal and allowed you to have more than one box open at the same time without any of them going stale. Now, they create these Kevlar liners that takes a bazooka to open and, in the process, scatters cereal all over the kitchen floor. This is excepting, of course, Shredded Wheat. These little bales of hay come three to a packet but, if you note on the specifications box, the figures are for TWO biscuits. This means that you have to figure 1.5 times all the figures to actually arrive at what you ate/are eating. On the other hand, you can re-pack one biscuit for the next time. This means that when Shredded Wheat comes around in breakfast rotation (about a week later) the one biscuit you saved has gone stale. Bummer.
Fixing my own meals doesn’t stop at breakfast. I now have to do both lunch and supper (or dinner – depending on where you were brought up). I wouldn’t mind so much, but I have to go out into the garage and open the freezer door to select an eatable. Once that’s done, I fix it in one of two ways: 1) boil it in a pan, or, 2) nuke it with microwaves. Done either way, the meal kind of tastes the same – bleh.
I haven’t included any animal pictures lately because even the squirrels are holed up in their air-conditioned condos awaiting cooler weather. I imagine it’s pretty hard on them because they start out with a fur coat and get warmer. Even the birds are panting when they land on the lawn. Their prey (worms, one presumes) are dug in deep enough so that even the sharpest robin’s beak can’t reach them. I know this is true because I saw a robin just the other day with a shovel over its shoulder.
Random thoughts are cool; one never knows where they will end up.