Day 4557

The dog days of summer are definitely here. It's hot. I feel lethargic. And there is a dearth of good news. When I turn on the TV during breakfast looking for something encouraging it's slim pickings these days. I lost interest in cable news quite a while ago. It doesn't matter which side of the political fence you're on, everyone is just pushing a narritive. I used to like watching the business channels, but that's turned very dismal lately. We're headed toward another recession. I can remember quite a few recessions in my past, but I'd been hoping to avoid another one at my age. It just takes too long to recover from these things. I don't have a long time to recover from another recession. Today I tried the weather channel. How can you go wrong with the weather channel? Never mind. This mornings coverage was all about the flooding in Yellowstone. One of my favorite areas is under water. Somehow it seems like everything in the world is under water these days.

I didn't feel like going to the gym today, so I tried another long walk right after breakfast. There was a nice breeze for a while, but it didn't last long enough. I can tell things are starting to dry out in the park. The meadows don't look as green and lush as they did a month ago. A lot of the wildflowers are starting to disappear as well.  It's a shame that we get all our rain at once in Texas. If the weather would spread things out and give us a little rain every month everything would look a lot greener in July and August. Our yard looks great now, but I'm going to have to start watering the lawn soon. That's a quick way to double the water bill. We don't have a sprinkler system, so even when I water I only use a small fraction of the water the sprinkler systems in the neighborhood use. When I see all the wet streets on our early walks with Dawn I quickly realize what an enormous amount of water these systems waste.

I managed to complete my six mile route today, but I was hot and tired by the time I returned home. I took a shower and then wanted to take a nap for a while. Dawn quickly left the room and sat outside the bedroom door, watching me and occasionally whining. I hate to see this, so I got up and took my nap on the couch in the living room. I keep telling Dawn that she's running out of time to be buddies with me. Janet will be going on vacation soon. Things will go a lot smoother if Dawn would realize that I mean no harm and would really like to be friends with her. The two guys that ran the puppy mill must have been terrible. A lot of the dogs that came from that place are suspicious of men.

Our air conditioner is having trouble keeping up with this heat. My HVAC guy told me once that air conditioning systems are basically designed to keep the air in your home up to twenty degrees colder than the outside air. This works pretty well when the temperatures are in the 80's and low 90's. Not so much when the temperature is over a 100 degrees every day. The best we are able to do on days like these is about 78 degrees. Coincidentally, this is the temperature the power company wants you to use to save energy. I don't know how much energy we're saving though, since the AC seems to be running all the time.

There are still a lot of things on my to-do list, but I'm not really in the mood to do any of them. Sometimes I fantasize about living in a nice new house in a safe little town. I'm sure there are people who thought the same thing when they moved to those little towns north of Yellowstone that are getting flooded now. There's really no escape anymore. Life is a roll of the dice these days, but I still think it helps to avoid all the drama. On that note, I've taken this weeks trash to the curb and am ready to start another uneventful week.

Hershey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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