More Musings, More Thoughts for Tuesday, October 6, 2020: A Summer-Hot Afternoon, Another Hurricane, & Other Less-than-Cheery Happenings

Hello, Dear Reader, it’s now time for my late afternoon post here on A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s now just a bit after 3 in the afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida, and it’s still a summer-like day outside. The temperature is, as Matthew Broderick’s character in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues likes to describe the weather in his Mississippi Army training base, “Africa hot.” 91˚F is the official temperature, but with the wind blowing from the east at 8 MPH (with 16 MPH gusts) and humidity at 57%, the heat index in the open with no cover is 101˚F, 100˚F in the shade.

And if that wasn’t bad enough to discourage me from going out for a walk, AccuWeather is predicting rain and thunderstorms in the near future. Per the reporting station near my neighborhood, it might even start to rain here within the next 10 minutes. It doesn’t say where in my neighborhood; my current planned community is so large that it makes the 4.5 square mile Fontainebleau Park area – my previous home’s location – look like a sandbox in comparison. Looking out through my window, it’s not even gray-skies overhead yet. (In fact, the sun is coming out from behind its veil of clouds for the first time today!) But if the ripples of heat in my study are any hint, it’s “Africa hot,” and I don’t dare go out in that kind of  heat, only to risk being soaked by a torrential downpour. Been there, done that, got bad colds instead of T-shirts.

Oh, yeah. There’s the matter of Hurricane Delta, which is way out to the southwest in the Gulf of Mexico and is not forecast to head toward the Sunshine State. But it is now a Category 4 hurricane, and its outer bands might make our weather picture somewhat dark and rainy, depending on its size and course track. It looks like Delta will affect the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or even the Florida Panhandle, but not my neck of the woods. Still, ugh.

And, as if I didn’t have enough woes already, my Remington rechargeable shaver died today. I managed to give it one last charge, and I managed to “sort of” shave the excess beard off my cheeks, but the damned thing died when I tried shaving my neck…which is always the toughest area for me to shave. And that shaver is less than two years old. Seriously…many consumer products are not made to last for long periods of time. I remember that I knew a World War II veteran – he was in his 60s then – back in the Eighties, and he had a 1940s-era electric shaver that still worked! Imagine that – a 1940s Philips electric razor. In working condition. Forty years later.

It’s a cliché, I know, but they don’t make them like they used to.

I was going to do another Life in the Time of COVID-19 post, but I feel so depressed already that one more look at the COVID-19 Dashboard would make me want to cry. I won’t pretend – a la Donald Trump – that the pandemic is “not worth worrying about” or that it is something that should not be feared, but I also don’t want to devote all of my writing time on that one topic.

I wanted to do a Star Wars figure review today because I get a kick out of writing that kind of blog post, but I need to be connected to the Internet to (a) get behind-the-scenes information about the Figure of the Day and (b) download images to illustrate the review with. Were I not disabled with a mild form of cerebral palsy – which makes it difficult to take good pictures with a smartphone – I would simply find a way to snap digital photos of my figures with my Motorola Moto and just use those. And since I had a bad habit of writing blog posts on Blogger directly back in the days before the pandemic, I can’t even read drafts for old reviews and write new ones based on the info I already have on the original A Certain Point of View blog.  

So, yeah. This second Musings & Thoughts post will have to suffice until tomorrow. It’s too late in the day to come up with a book or movie review, and I am too tired and somewhat bummed out about – as Douglas Adams might have said – life, the Universe, and everything to start on one of those now.

I wish I had something more meaningful or entertaining to say. Unfortunately, the metaphorical ink well for my equally metaphorical pen is dry, and right now this is the best my middle-aged mind can conjure up.   Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day all around.

Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and be kind to others. And if the Force is with me, I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.