Musings & Thoughts for Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in my corner of Florida, and I’m still a bit tired  from my bout of insomnia from the night of August 24/25, 2020. Right now it’s hot and muggy outside; the temperature is 85˚F, but with humidity at a whopping 83% and a 5 MPH land breeze from the east, it feels like 98˚F in the sun and 95˚F in the shade. I’m sure glad I am not outside right now; I used to love going out on the front porch of my former home in Miami with a book and read in the sunshine and fresh air, but not in scorchers like today, and definitely not any time near noon.

Plus, even though Florida summers have always been known for their hot mornings and rainy/stormy afternoons, I remember when they were not as hellishly hot. Maybe my memories of my oft-misspent youth are faulty, but even my late mother remarked more than a few times – whilst she was still with us – that she didn’t remember the season being so damned hot.

I don’t envy the essential workers that are out there right now making sure that our society at large – which has been affected so badly that the novel COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic – keeps functioning. Even though the public health crisis has turned many of us into house-bound telecommuter workers, teachers, and caregivers (not to mention crabby and restless folks who would just like a semblance of our old lives back), millions of others still do what they must to keep the nations of the world running. This includes restaurant/fast food delivery drivers, postal workers and employees of such delivery services as UPS, FedEx, Lasership (ugh), and Amazon Prime.

Sure, they don’t have to walk long distances or toil under broiling sun like construction workers or road repair crews, but even so, they do have to get out of vehicles carrying stuff around to drop them off at their intended destinations. And sometimes that “stuff” is either heavy, hot (in the case of prepared food from restaurants), unwieldy, or a combination of all three. And in summertime Florida, you have to keep in mind that there are places where there’s little to no shade and the feels-like temperature is in the high 90s and low 100s.

Right now I’m keeping track of a delivery I’m expecting from Amazon: the Star Wars The Black Series Snowspeeder with Dak Ralter and a Star Wars The Black Series Luke Skywalker (Snowspeeder) (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back 40^th Anniversary) figure that I ordered on Sunday. Per my phone’s Amazon app, those two items are Out for Delivery and should be arriving between 4 and 7 PM my time. Right now it’s almost 11:30 AM Eastern, so I still have quite a few hours to wait before my new collectibles get here. Hopefully we won’t get any thunderstorms in our area before then; it’s already hard enough on those delivery personnel that they have to make their rounds when it’s hot; imagine how difficult it is to do that in a subtropical downpour.

That having been said, I am excited that I am getting that cool Snowspeeder and the appropriate Luke Skywalker figure to go with it. I have a Luke Skywalker (X-Wing Pilot) figure in the same scale (6-inch), and it is similar, but the Snowspeeder variant has the Rebel hero and future Jedi Master wearing the gear that is appropriate for the ice planet Hoth. I’m still not sure where we are going to put it, but it’s likely that we’ll put up a floating shelf somewhere on a wall in my study and display the Snowspeeder and the figures there.

It’s kind of amusing, really, to note that I’m a middle-aged screenwriter, blogger, and film reviewer, with adult hopes, fears, and responsibilities, yet I still get excited over getting new Star Wars collectibles.

Well, that’s it for this edition of Musings & Thoughts, folks. As I said earlier, I am still worn out from my sleepless night that heralded my work week, so as soon as I post this I will go rest on the couch. I have to be offline, as my house mate needs the Wi-Fi to work from home, and she has her home office in the room where the signal is weakest. So, until next time, I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.