Musings & Thoughts for Saturday, August 12, 2023, or: Weekend Update, Part the First – Hellishly Hot Edition

Late Morning/Early Afternoon, Saturday, August 12, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Another Hellishly Sweltering Day in the Summer of ‘23

Hi, there.

Well, here we are again, on a stifling midsummer day in Florida, starting one of those weird “meh” weekends where I must figure out if I’m going to take the day off from working on Reunion: Coda and relax, or if I’m going to bite the bullet and make up for several days of not coming up with new material for the novel.

Obviously, on a day when it’s not quite noon – as I write these words, anyway – and the temperature is already 93°F/34°C (there’s an ongoing excessive heat advisory for the Tampa Bay area) under sunny conditions, I am not going to venture outside, so even though I can and should take the day off, walking to the park and reading for a while on a bench in the shade of a tree is not an option. The forecast for today calls for mostly sunny skies and a high of 97°F/36°C. (The heat index – or “feels like” temperature – will be higher than that: try the low 100s/high 30s low 40s.)

As I’ve so often said before, in my old – and much missed – neighborhoods in Miami, I used to be a bit more outdoorsy than I am now. Yes, I preferred to stay indoors and either watch TV or read (or, when I was a kid, play with my toys), but I also enjoyed playing outside with my friends or, later in life, take long, leisurely walks (constitutionals) to get some exercise and socialize with my neighbors.

I know that some of my conservative readers and/or stalkers will laugh and say I don’t know what I’m talking about, but our planet’s climate is changing, and not for the better. Summers, especially in the Deep South, are getting hotter, and higher temperatures persist far longer than they used to. When I was a kid in South Florida, hot, rainy weather hung around till mid-September, then we’d start getting the occasional cold snaps. In the 2000s and 2010s, I noticed that in the Miami area, the cold snaps came, all right, but far later than they used to, and they usually were milder and had shorter spans than the ones I experienced in my childhood years.

So, no. I will not be going to the park and sitting on my favorite park bench. Nor will I go to the nearby pool, the keychain that my mother gave me when I was 16 for the keys to the house and the security gate, a keychain that I never lost and was quite fond of disappeared somehow. In its place I have two keychains, both of which I don’t care for – one is too small and can be easily misplaced; the other is too big and unwieldy for the limited use it gets. (I wish I had my Miami keychain!) If I go to the pool, I’d need to not only take my wallet with an ID to prove to the pool’s staff that I live here, but I’d also need to take my key lest I accidentally be locked out of the house.

So, no walk to the park; no swimming pool trip for me.

Argh. Summer in Florida, how I loathe you so.

What to Do? Chill? Or Work?

As usual on these weird “meh” weekends, I must decide how I am going to spend these rather empty hours on weekends. After all, even though I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area for slightly longer than seven years, I don’t have a large group of friends and family here. (I have no family in Miami, either; I no longer speak to my older half-sister Vicky, and the estrangement between us – which Mom long foresaw but hoped would never happen – is the primary reason why I moved here. But I still have friends there.)  Thus – no one to make any plans of any sort with, whether it’s to go to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, have a beer or two at a nearby watering hole, or just hang out. And, of course, no dates, either.

So, since stay at home I must, my options this weekend are, as always:

• Watch a movie or TV show, either in my room or out in the family room
• Read a book (which I do on a daily basis, but in dribs and drabs)
• Listen to music, either in my room or out in the family room
• “Hang out” online on social media (X, Facebook, and/or Instagram)
• Play computer games
• Work on Reunion: Coda

That’s my Menu of Things to Do. Nothing more – except maybe a chore or two – and nothing less.

I haven’t decided which option I’ll choose. More than likely, I’ll probably combine two or three of my choices. If I felt a lot better than I do, I’d know for sure what to do. At the moment, though, I don’t feel terribly enthusiastic about the weekend, so I’ll just play things by ear.